Two for the show
by mousie tongue
Summary: After her uncle is taken, young Natasha Romanov ends up in state's custody at a group home. She can tough it out alone... but somehow fellow resident Clint Barton becomes the reason she doesn't have to. A high school AU.
1. One for the money

**Warnings: **This story contains bullying, physical and verbal; sexualized assault of a minor; minor-on-minor violence; homophobia and homophobic language; swearing; mentions of an eating disorder, child abuse, and possible non-con of a minor (though you can choose to read it as rape didn't happen- it's left vague.)

This was written to fill a prompt on avengerkink, and it got long so I'm posting it here.

* * *

After intake is finally, excruciatingly completed, Natasha is led by the falsely cheerful woman down a hallway to the residential wing. The woman (_Director? Caseworker? Paper-pusher, in any case_) points out features along the way.

"There's a courtyard out that door—no smoking on premises, of course. Library in here—it's small, but very nice for quiet study. You enjoy school? Have a good work ethic? The rec room is right next door—we even have a Wii now, donated by a local foundation. Everyone takes turns."

Noise seeps through the closed rec room door—television, at least two competing music beats, raised voices—and Natasha catches a glimpse of frenetic motion through the thick glass window before they sail past.

Her assigned home is one of four beds in a square cement-block room, hers bare but for a plastic-covered pillow and mattress. A narrow dresser doubles as a nightstand and desk, with a plastic chair set before it; a plastic drawer-bin fits under the bed. The woman points.

"Your linens are in there; fresh sheets and towels are passed out once a week. See your day monitor if you have an accident, don't just take more from Laundry. Get settled in and then you're free to explore the premises or join the others in Rec. Another resident checked in just last week, so you won't be the only newcomer!" She points again, this time at the packet in Natasha's hand. "But I recommend you familiarize yourself with the guidelines of Mountainview. It will make things easier for you in the long run." She smiles, wide, empty, already disengaging from her newest charge. "Welcome, Natasha. You'll find a safe haven here."

Once the woman has gone, Natasha lowers herself to perch on the edge of her bed. Her hands, clenched on the strap of her bag and the intake packet, tremble subtly.

For a long, blank moment she allows it; then, with a shudder and furious blinking, she stills her hands and slides to her knees to pull the drawer from beneath the bed.

* * *

Natasha has unpacked, made her bed, and committed the rules to memory and is staring sightlessly at the pages in her lap when her roommates burst in, chattering, shrieking out giggles and knocking against each other in effort to get through the door.

"Did you_ see _the nerve of that little _dickwaffle_," one girl in the back is saying, and "Gonna get his _ass_ handed to him is what," the one in front says. Then she jams to a stop at the sight of Natasha, sitting on the bed with her back braced on the wall. "Oh, looky here—new girl."

The two girls in back jockey to get through the doorway, but the lead girl punches at them with elbows and shoulders and they subside, resorting to craning to see around her.

Tall, and slender—painfully so—with cheekbones sharp as one of Uncle Alex's blades, and startlingly pale eyes, the lead girl looks Natasha up and down with the beginnings of a sneer twisting her lip. "Who're you?"

_Queen Bee_, Natasha assesses, _and her drones_, but she answers, a cautious testing of the waters. "Natasha Romanov."

"That _Russian?_"

"I suppose."

"You suppose?" Queen Bee makes a _pfft_ sound. "Don't you even know what you are?" Her drones giggle, and Queen Bee seems to draw confidence from the sound, chin rising as she steps into the room. "Family mobbed up and busted? That how you got here?"

"No," Natasha says softly, eyes tracking warily.

"_No_," Queen Bee mimics, and her drones giggle again and Natasha sees how it will be—that she will grovel and flatter, or she will be the target of venom and barbs.

Ah, well. It's not like she expected this to be easy.

"Who're _you?_" Natasha asks, because if it's going to be hostile she may as well put names to her enemies at once.

Queen Bee looks a little miffed that Natasha has gone off-script already, but "Cherie," she answers, and, with a jerk of her head toward the others, "Kaitlyn; Elena."

"Ellie," the black-haired drone corrects. "Is that your real hair?"

Cherie laughs, low and derisive. "Better hope so—who'd _choose _such a trashy color if they weren't born with it?"

"Ronald McDonald?" Kaitlyn asks, fake-innocent, and the three dissolve into giggles once more.

A burning knot draws tight behind Natasha's breastbone, but she remembers Uncle Alex's lessons and lets only a careful blankness show on her face. She goes back to staring at Mountainview's rules while the girls crash around the room, between the dressers and beds, in and out of the shared bathroom that connects the adjoining room.

Finally a bell rings. "That's _dinner,_ Clueless," Cherie snaps when Natasha waits to see what it signals.

The dining hall is crowded, noisy; it smells of tomato sauce and onions. Natasha hangs back to watch the dynamics of the place. It's not hard to sort out the hierarchy—Cherie is top of the foodchain of girls; a blond boy, with heavy shoulders and large hands, controls the boys. Cherie and her drones flutter around him and his own entourage. They bring drinks, a forgotten fork, extra bread; and then, their serving duties completed, the girls settle across from the boys at the large round table nearest the windows. Cherie glows when the blond slaps her ass in passing.

The corner nearest the kitchen doors and trash bins seems least desirable; Natasha takes her tray there, to a table filled with the youngest kids. They slide sideways glances at her but don't object when she pulls out a chair. Noise is centered at the window table, with the blond boy keeping up a constant, and loud, commentary on whatever fleeting thought seems to cross his mind. Natasha keeps her head bent but not ducked too low as she eats, watching from guarded eyes.

She sees the altercation coming before it happens—a slight, dark-haired boy with the drawn-in hunch of one who has known years of abuse rises to return his tray; two boys at tables nearest the blond's shove their chairs out, blocking his way; then Kaitlyn does the same, forcing the boy to detour directly behind the blond. The blond's foot shoots out; the dark-haired boy side-steps, and receives a vicious kick to the ankle for his trouble. He stumbles, his tray tilting, and dishes and silverware crash to the floor.

The blond and his cronies whistle and high-five while one of the aides comes over to hand a sponge to the dark-haired boy. "Clean it up, Bruce," she sighs, not unkindly, and a ripple of low, mean laughter circles the table. Bruce flushes and drops awkwardly to swab at the floor.

The aide goes back to the steam trays; the blond boy is grinning, leaning back in his chair, as he casts self-satisfied looks at the younger boy crouched on the floor.

Suddenly he yelps shrilly and lurches forward against the table. "What the fuck?" he yells, clutching at the back of his head. "What the_ fuck_, man?"

"What the hell's wrong with you?" one of the other boys demands, and "Danny, _what?_" Cherie asks with deep concern. The blond throws himself off his chair, scrabbles his hand across the floor, and bounces back up holding something aloft.

"Somebody_ shot_ this at me!" he screeches. He waves something between thumb and forefinger to the table at large. "Shot me in the _head!_" He stares wildly around the dining hall.

"That's a dried bean," Ellie announces.

"I know it's a fucking bean! It still hurt! It coulda put a hole through my _skull!" _He glares down at Bruce, who pales and backs away.

"Naw, man, it wasn't him, I had my eyes on him the whole time," another boy says.

"Then who the fuck is firing shit at me?" The blond—Danny—is shooting fevered glances around the room again. Some of the other kids are watching curiously, others focusing carefully on their trays and not the altercation, but no one looks overtly guilty. Even the kids directly behind the blond have scared but thoroughly innocent expressions.

It's only when Natasha rises to bus her tray that she catches sight of a boy sitting alone on the far side of the room, wearing the very faintest of smirks.

He can't possibly be the culprit, though; no one could possibly have hit Danny in the back of the head from that angle.

* * *

Natasha learns quickly to hide her toothbrush and underwear; she learns which areas belong to Danny and Cherie and which are safe to linger in; and she learns which staffers are malicious and which are merely indifferent. How to keep her head down and her mouth closed, that she already knows.

Monday morning finds Natasha filing down the drive with the rest of the residents, to await the buses from the local middle and high schools. She has a cheap black backpack issued by the State, basic supplies, a voucher for lunch, and a lump in her stomach.

"Here comes Ronnie McDonnie," Cherie sing-songs as Natasha drifts up to the bus stop. The other girl is hovering around Danny, trying to drop little touches onto his back and arms, but the boy keeps shouldering away from her to kick gravel at the youngest kids and scuffle with his friends. He looks up at Cherie's taunt, and, with an oily grin, saunters over and yanks Natasha's braid.

"Yeowch!" he says, shaking out his hand. "Burned my fingers on that red hair!"

The look Cherie shoots Natasha is deadly.

The first bus pulls up in a cloud of exhaust and Natasha hangs back to let the others board ahead of her. She scans for an empty spot while Danny and Cherie and their pack shove toward the back. There's room halfway down the aisle next to a boy who looks to be about Natasha's own age of thirteen; she squeezes past elbows and rolling backpacks.

"No, you don't, JINS," the boy says hastily as she starts to slip into the seat. He slings one leg up onto the vinyl padding. "Go sit with Lardass over there, not here."

Flames boil under her skin as she looks to the indicated seat. There's already a Mountainview kid sitting there—the boy from the dining hall who'd dare smile at Danny getting popped in the head.

He's half-turned toward the window as if he's paying no attention, with his chin sunk in the collar of a bulky coat at least two sizes too large for him. He doesn't even flick a glance at her, but hitches sideways. The coat makes him look far heavier than he actually is, so there's room on the bench seat for another person.

"Find a seat!" the bus driver bellows, and Natasha drops quickly beside the boy.

The noise level rises as the bus jerks into motion; Natasha sneaks a peek at the boy, who is still staring fixedly at the window. "What's JINS?" she asks, low.

He cuts his eyes to her, then away again. "That's us—JINS—Juveniles In Need of Supervision. We're, like, trash, to the regular kids."

Natasha tells herself she doesn't care.

* * *

They've put her in the basic classes, she realizes immediately. All those tests she'd been given after Uncle Alex didn't come back to their last home and she'd ended up with DYFS—pages and pages of little ovals to fill in in a test booklet—they'd been placement tests. It's a bit humiliating, because Natasha is bright, she honestly is. It's just that all those intervals as she and Uncle Alex crisscrossed the continent have left gaps in subjects adults consider vital.

She doesn't actually mind until science class. No one has treated her like trash (_yet, _says a little voice in her mind) and the school is big enough that her newness barely registers with anyone. She thinks if she can pass unnoticed she can get through this ordeal somehow. Some people even seem friendly—a golden-haired boy approximately the size of a small mountain had stopped her as they entered the classroom and boomed, "You would make a perfect Ophelia!" She has only the vaguest idea what that had meant, but he'd said it with genuine admiration.

And then Cherie slouched in.

Whatever hopeful feeling was loosening Natasha's chest withered and tightened. Cherie glared daggers as she marched past, and Natasha could feel the weight of her glower on the back of her neck as class began. Not even the sight of a familiar face—her seatmate from the bus was sitting cattycorner behind her—could calm the sick dread churning Natasha's stomach.

She'd gone all day without seeing her toxic roommate, and now here she was, at Natasha's back every day.

* * *

The strangeness of her placement gradually begins to fade, but Natasha remains wary and alert. After school there are scheduled activities (_"_To promote healthy socialization"), and a changing roster of chores (_"_To teach life skills and responsibility"), and even some free time; Natasha uses that mainly to scout out bolt-holes.

Her name comes up for kitchen clean-up one night, along with the boy from the bus, and, of course with her luck, Cherie.

The aide gives the three of them a flat stare. "Cherie; Clint; Natasha—ya'll know what to do," she says, and retreats out the back door with a cigarette and her phone. Cherie claims the easiest task—shifting bins of dirty dishware over to the counter by the huge industrial dishwashers. She points. "You—Ronnie McDonnie—scrape and load." She snatches a sponge and goes out to wipe down tables.

Clint dumps the pots and pans into the sink, squirts soap, opens the faucet full blast. Natasha turns to fumble with a dishwasher latch until it springs open; she stares into it.

She knows twenty-two ways to cook hotdogs—two involving a car's engine—but this high-tech appliance is nothing she's familiar with.

Cherie breezes back into the kitchen carrying used glasses and forks. "What is your _problem_, moron? Haven't you ever seen a dishwasher before?"

Natasha flushes. "Is there a certain way it has to be filled?" she forces herself to ask. There must be—all the different racks and baskets and fold-y bits… she doesn't want to be responsible for breaking this thing.

"Oh my god, you are, like, too stupid to live! It's a dishwasher, you feeb—you put dishes in it and turn it on!"

Natasha's face is burning nearly as bright as her hair. "Could you just…"

"Are you Amish _and_ stupid? How hard could it be, dumbass?"

"Fuck off." Clint elbows Cherie aside. "Go puke up your dinner."

Cherie pales. Her mouth opens soundlessly and then she spins and rushes from the kitchen.

Clint doesn't spare a glance after her, he just rolls out the bottom rack and starts slotting plates into it. Bowls are propped in the wider center spaces, glasses on top, silverware sorted in the baskets. He doesn't say a word until he's filled the soap dispenser and toggled it closed, set the wash cycle and started it. "Okay?"

"Yeah." Some of the heat has cooled from Natasha's face at his matter-of-fact demonstration. "_Does_ she puke up her dinner?"

"Usually," Clint shrugs. He's shed his ever-present bulky jacket, and he starts rolling his sleeves up over sinewy forearms.

Natasha slips between him and the sink full of pots. "I got this."

He hears her unspoken 'Thank you'. "Okay. I'll dry."

* * *

The hostilities escalate. Natasha hides her toiletries and sleeps in her favorite jeans. She lurks in the library, with its battered collection of paperbacks and Bruce's silent company, or outside in the bushes lining the side lawn, away from the courtyard—Cherie's domain—and the basketball court—Danny's. Some of the other kids send her pitying looks, but mostly they're just glad not to be a target.

Danny, though… Danny makes a point of tugging her braid most mornings at the bus stop, as well as delivering one filthy innuendo or another. Making her blush or blanch seems to have become his mission in life. He ignores her sharp 'Stop its' and her knocking his hands away.

Cherie's gaze turns stonier every time he does it. There are barbs, whispers, insults.

Arriving at the science classroom makes her physically sick to her stomach.

"Fair maiden!" Golden-haired Thor has reached the door before her, and he steps aside with a bow and a flourish, holding it open for her. She has a momentary flash of warmth before reality in the form of Cherie's glowering face dashes ice over her.

The teacher dims the lights, fires up a Power Point presentation, and for a few moments Natasha relaxes under the cover of darkness.

Then something flicks onto the back of her shoulder.

A smothered giggle from behind her sends her stomach plummeting, but she starts to turn, to knock whatever disgusting thing has been thrown at her off of her back.

"Don't move!" A low mutter raps out from her other side, and Natasha freezes.

Something whizzes past her, barely skimming her back and the braid lying along her spine. She looks down, and a huge wad of virulent green gum, caught on a thick rubber band, is now lying in the aisle. She turns; Clint is staring his hands, folded innocently on his lab table.

Natasha waits, gaze fixed on him, until he feels its weight and sneaks a glance at her. 'Thanks', she mouths, and he lifts one shoulder in a shrug.

* * *

They never catch him at it.

Someone trips or shoves Bruce or another young kid, and within seconds that someone is clapping a hand to their ass or arm or thigh and squealing. Dried beans or sometimes acorns from the tree near the driveway skitter away after impact, but no one ever sees where they come from.

Only Natasha.

Uncle Alex had trained her to _always _be vigilant, to carefully observe her surroundings, and she alone catches the silent and swift strikes.

Only she sees the quick twist of a rubber band around Clint's nimble fingers, and the unerring accuracy of his aim. Only she notices when he scrounges bits and pieces and upgrades to a slingshot. Only she sees when it increases his range and he starts disappearing into the treetops, and, she suspects, the ceilings.

Her suspicion is confirmed one evening as she slips down the halls looking for a quiet place to hide out until bedtime. The weather has turned bitterly cold, and huddling in the bushes outside has very little appeal.

Someone is at the door to the janitor's closet, hunched over the doorknob. Natasha recognizes the coat enveloping the figure, and glides up behind him on silent feet.

He's so intent on what he's doing that he doesn't notice her until he breathes out a huff of frustration and Natasha murmurs, "What are you trying to do?"

Clint nearly hits the ceiling.

Natasha backs up a hasty step, hands raised, as Clint hurls himself sideways to slam his back to the wall. His normally blank hooded eyes are alive with sudden panic.

"Sorry! I'm sorry!"

"Jesus!"

"I didn't mean to startle you."

He sags a little against the bricks, panting. "Give a guy a little warning, shit."

"Never drop your situational awareness," Natasha tells him. She moves forward, eying the scratches on the lock. "What are you using to pick that—I mean, to _try _and pick that?"

Clint grimaces. He rolls his neck, settling his coat around his shoulders, and pushes off the wall. He holds his hand out to Natasha, palm flat.

She _tsks _at the object on it. "A nail? That won't work—it's too thick, and the point is too sharp to apply even pressure."

"You have a better idea?"

She thinks for a moment. "Can you get me a couple of tines from the garden rake Dawn was using in the yard the other day?"

He studies her for a long moment before he nods. "Go somewhere else 'til I get back, don't just hang out here."

Natasha rolls her eyes. "Duh."

She skulks around the kitchen, letting that night's clean-up crew think she's trying to scrounge leftovers, until a flicker of motion at the doorway prompts her to return to the utility hall. Clint hands her two thin metal strips.

"Okay, good." Natasha bends one in half, creasing the flexible metal into a V-shape. "Now watch."

She slips the ends of the bent piece into the keyhole, pressing and turning until they catch on the mechanism within. Holding it in place with one hand, she pushes the second strip into the doorjamb and wiggles it against the latch.

The door pops open.

Clint hisses in appreciation. "Cool. Thanks."

Natasha shakes her head, reaches around to the inside knob to depress the locking button, and pushes the door shut again. "Uh-uh. You do it."

"I just wanted the door open. It's open."

But Natasha stands firm. "_You _do it."

It takes him a while. His shoulders start to twitch and he jumps at every distant doorslam and shout, but he keeps at the lock. Finally Natasha steps forward, covers his hands with her smaller ones, and guides him through the motions.

The door pops again, and again she closes it. "You…"

"…do it, I know."

This time he manages on his own. It takes him eight minutes, but he manages.

His grin lights up his usually solemn face.

"Good," Natasha nods. "Once more, Barton."

He cuts his time in half.

"Keep practicing," Natasha tells him as she turns to leave. "You should be able to get it down to seconds, especially with a lock you know well."

"Wait," Clint says as he tucks the metal strips away. "Do you, uh… want to see why I needed in here?"

The ever-present lump of ice in her stomach softens a little, but Natasha feigns nonchalance. "Sure."

They slip into the closet and Clint flicks the lightswitch once he's pulled the door closed. Floor-to-ceiling shelves are filled with cleaning supplies, and the floor is cluttered with buckets and a floor buffer. Clint upends one of the buckets, steps onto it, and reaches for a shelf above his head. "Follow me."

He pulls himself up onto the shelves and bumps a ceiling panel, lifting and sliding it aside. Then he sticks his arms into the resulting gap and hoists himself into the ceiling.

His head pops back out as Natasha begins to climb. "There's a conduit right above your head, and an air duct to the right—grab those, not the ceiling tile grid."

Her arms burn as she drags herself up, but she manages to pull herself up without assistance. As soon as she flops into the narrow dark space, Clint starts crawling away. "Stay on the pipes and crossbeams," he says over his shoulder. "The ducts make a helluva noise if you lean on them, and the drop ceiling's flimsy."

They creep through dusty dimness, zigzagging now and then to navigate around walls. Finally Clint pulls himself into a corner half-blocked by a huge steel duct.

Natasha squeezes in next to him. "Where are we?"

"Over the dining hall." He lightly taps the smooth steel. "This is the kitchen exhaust vent."

"So… what? You just hang out here in the dark?"

There's a _click_, and a beam of light cuts through the space. "I have a flashlight." Clint's voice is a little defensive. "And sometimes I… patrol."

"Patrol." Now that she's seen his setup, it's obvious what he means. "You can see into the rooms."

"Most of them."

She goes breathless with sudden horror. "The girls' shower room? The _bathrooms?_"

"No! That's fucked-up creepy." She feels his shoulders lift in a shrug. "Besides, there's no drop ceilings over those rooms. And the vents aren't accessible except from below."

"Good to know."

"I'm not… I'm not like Danny, y'know."

"I wouldn't have followed you up here if you were."

That seems to be as much of a personal exchange as he can handle. Clint pushes up onto his knees. "Getting late. C'mon, Romanov, I'll show you my vantage points on the way back."

Each room where the residents congregate has at least one ceiling tile with a loop of wire twisted into its upper side. Clint has only to flatten on his stomach, lift an edge of tile by the wire, and line up his shots. Natasha is impressed despite herself.

"How did you get up here in the first place if you couldn't pick the lock?" she asks as they slither back down into the closet.

"Sometimes they forget to lock the door." Clint pats his pocket. "That won't be a problem now."

"Better keep practicing, Barton."

* * *

Winter grinds along slowly.

Cherie and Danny mark Valentine's Day by having a screaming fight outside the sophomore cafeteria.

Natasha and Clint mark it by finding a way onto Mountainview's roof.

It's windy and cold up there, but Clint thinks they can swing down to access any window… as soon as Natasha works out a way to open them from the outside.

Two days later, he sidles up to her in the hall between classes. "Metal spatula from the Home Arts room. They were decorating cakes this morning."

Natasha's eyes light up at the thought of a flexible metal tool, perfect for sliding into a window frame. "I'm on it."

"Cool." Clint gives her braid a light tug in farewell.

Natasha continues on toward math class, mentally mapping an infiltration of the cooking classroom. As she reaches her classroom, she's brought up short by another yank on her braid, this one hard enough to wrench her head backward. Shocked, she lashes out; her hand connects not with Clint's arm, but with Danny's meatier one. He's glaring hotly at her.

"Get off!" she snarls, and after a heartbeat he opens his hand and lets the rope of her hair slide free.

Natasha swears silently, a foul curse she'd heard Uncle Alex spit a time or two, as she watches Danny plow his way down the hall, bumping aside other students. Shaken more than she wants to admit, she vows not to let Danny get that close to her again.

Stealing a cooking utensil proves to be no challenge at all; avoiding Danny is a much more delicate dance. Whether prompted by his very public fight with Cherie or by sudden possessiveness from seeing Clint's hand on her hair, Danny is suddenly ever-present, lurking in the girls' wing, staring, trying to follow her.

"What the hell is up with him?" Clint asks one evening when Natasha has to detour out a bathroom window in order to dodge Danny while still making their planned rendezvous.

She's not surprised he's noticed, even though they ignore each other in public. "He's just being weird. Leave it, he'll get bored and focus on someone else."

Clint worries at his slingshot. "Want me to pop him?"

"No! You'll just make it worse. Leave it, Barton."

Natasha is jolted awake early one morning by Kaitlyn and Ellie pinning her to the bed. The girls' eyes are skittish with fear, so she doesn't rip free and lash out at them. Then Cherie is above her, holding a nail file to Natasha's throat.

"One warning, bitch—that's all you get. Stay away from Danny."

Natasha regards her levelly. "Tell _him_ to stay away from _me_. Get him to keep his sweaty hands off me and I won't stick that file in your ribs."

Uncertainty overlays Cherie's hard expression. She glances from the younger girl's too-calm face (mistake #1) to the thin metal clenched awkwardly (mistake #2) in her hand, and then pushes up with a toss of her head. "I mean it, bitch. You don't want to mess with me."

"It's true," Kaitlyn nods as she and Ellie hastily release Natasha and step back. "People who fuck with us get hurt. People who fuck with our men get hurt even worse."

"Are you blind? Haven't you noticed he's fucking with me?"

Cherie has no reply to that. "Just back off or see what happens."

One thing that happens is Cherie has an epic fight with Danny in the corridor leading to the boys' locker room. It's the talk of the school the next day, and neither Cherie nor Danny are on the evening bus-run. Kaitlyn's eyes are red at lights-out and Ellie shoves Natasha hard into the doorframe. "She got taken to juvie, you skanky bitch!"

Natasha stares back, her shoulders tensing, her hands rising slightly. "How is it my fault that some skeeve I can't stand won't leave me alone?" she asks, deadly soft.

Ellie shoves her away.

They don't touch her after that.

Danny is back the next day, strutting and swaggering after his overnight stay in lock-up. Too many witnesses confirm he never laid a hand on Cherie, even after she'd started slapping and kicking him, for him to be held on assault charges.

He winks at Natasha across the dining hall and she nearly throws up.

* * *

He gets one hand fisted on her hair and rocks her back against the wall with his other forearm to her chest, and then grins down at her, triumphant.

_Stupid, stupid, rookie mistake stupid,_ Natasha berates herself, even as Danny pokes his fingers through the strands of her braid and tugs.

Danny never misses a meal; she'd thought she was in the clear as she'd lingered a few minutes in her blessedly empty room. She'd thought the halls would be empty as she wandered in late to dinner.

She'd been wrong, oh-so-wrong.

He kicks out behind her and the rec room door slams open. The TV is on, sound turned loud in the empty room. Between that and the noise from the dining hall no one is going to hear her, even if she screams.

Danny drags her around the doorjamb and lets the door swing closed.

"Be nice now," he pants, shifting his arm so he can reach the button of her jeans. Natasha can feel his fingers scrabbling and she's sickened by the heat of them. "You got carpeting installed yet, little girl? I wanna see if it matches the drapes."

His arm drops lower, grinding into her breasts, and Natasha whites out.

She drops her head and sinks her teeth into his arm, clamping down hard to try and get her teeth to meet through cloth and flesh. Danny howls, wrenches away; she moves before he can strike her, driving a stiffened hand into his gut, then jabbing upwards beneath his ribs. He drops, choking, and she slams her foot at his balls.

She hits thigh instead as he snaps into a protective curl on the dingy carpet, but it's a good, solid kick with a lot of force behind it—he'll have a massive bruise.

Color bleeds back into her vision; Natasha backs up, breath shuddering, and waits while Danny writhes and gags.

"You bitch!" he finally wheezes. "You fucking little c…"

She poises one foot over his throat. "Shut up."

Danny goes still.

"I'll say this once, so listen closely." She bends, speaking low under the blare of the TV. "You touch me again, you come near me, you _think _about me—I'll tell everyone we fucked. And then I'll tell everyone we fucked just the once, because you _piss your bed_, and I don't fuck someone who reeks like a hamster cage." She waits for his eyes to re-focus on hers. He still looks stunned at how hard she'd been able to hit him. "And if you go after anyone else who isn't interested, same thing—_everyone_ finds out what a pissy little dick you are."

"Nobody's gonna believe a piece of shit like you," Danny blusters.

Natasha turns, smooth grace although she's quaking inside. "Want to put that to the test?"

She leaves him on the floor before he can sputter some sort of comeback.

* * *

Natasha marches up to Clint and hands him a pair of sewing shears she'd lifted from the Home Arts room. She twitches at her braid. "Cut it."

He looks from the scissors to her hair, and then his gaze settles on her face. "Do I need to handle something?" he asks quietly.

"No. It's handled." Natasha gestures sharply. "Just cut it off."

* * *

.


	2. Two for the show

There's a peaceful lull as the weather warms to spring. Clint digs up a pocketful of ball bearings from somewhere, and spends most of his free time crouched on the roof while Natasha slips from point to point on the ground, setting up targets that get progressively smaller and more hidden. Except for the ones she puts _behind _the trees just to tick him off, he hole-punches each one dead center.

Danny is suddenly acting as though girls are totally off his radar, though the younger boys are still fair game to his kicks and punches. As the ground thaws, he develops a new fondness for tripping them into the muck, and Clint spends a long week skulking around and firing mud balls at the seat of Danny's pants, until the other boy finally wises up.

Natasha thinks he's beginning to suspect Clint is behind the stealth retaliation.

* * *

The school year draws to a close.

The younger Mountainview kids are signed up for various summer day programs; there are a few charity slots for the older kids at a sleepaway camp down in the Pines, but only a few. Ms. Martinez, the senior caseworker, scrambles to find steady activities or jobs to occupy the others.

"I see in your file that you spoke Russian at home with your… guardian," Ms. Martinez says one afternoon after calling Natasha to her office.

"My uncle, Alexei," Natasha corrects.

"Your uncle, then. But you must be quite fluent."

She shrugs. "I haven't spoken it in a year."

"I'm sure that won't matter. The middle school is running a summer enrichment program, and languages are one of the choices offered. It would be lovely if you volunteered as a student assistant."

Natasha doesn't think it sounds lovely at all. Ms. Martinez sighs. "I can arrange for you to receive class credit, the same as if you had attended summer school session."

They're not going to let her sit in the trees all summer while Clint shoots things. Natasha grudgingly accepts.

Clint won't be spending the summer sitting in a tree, either. It turns out the only way Thor passed Basic Science was because Clint coached him through it, and now Thor wants to return the favor by reserving a spot for him in the local summer lacrosse league.

"I didn't know you played lacrosse," Natasha says that evening as they squeeze into the crawlspace corner next to the kitchen vent. It's too hot now to be in the ceiling, but Clint has rolled his coat into a tight bundle, tied it into a plastic bag, and is stowing it safely until the weather cools again. He shrugs.

"I don't. But Thor is really, really persuasive when he's enthused about something."

"So next year you're signing up for the school musical with him?" Natasha hides a smirk at his look of horror.

"Shit, no!" He sticks his feet out and wiggles them. "But Ms. Martinez is so happy to have one less kid to schedule that she's buying me a new pair of sneakers. Besides," he adds airily, "it's just another type of hitting a target."

* * *

A huge gold Ford Bronco slows at the end of the driveway; Thor's got his head out the passenger window, hair streaming in the wind, and he looses some sort of battle cry as the tires crunch to a stop. "**Clint Barton!**" he roars happily. "Are you girded for battle, my friend?"

"**Clint, darling!**" Thor's mother Frigga bellows from the driver's seat. "Help yourself to bacon and egg sandwiches from the cooler, we brought extra!"

"Oh, I wish I could watch this," Natasha murmurs as Clint climbs into the backseat; he has time to send her a look of mute appeal before the car revs and skids back onto the road.

After her own bus ride to the middle school, Natasha expects to find rows of desks and bored 10- and 11-year-olds parroting words, but the teacher has cleared the floor except for a pair of Twister mats. The classroom is soon rowdy with shrieks of laughter as Natasha calls out colors in Russian and the children scramble to interpret her words.

There's cookies and gingerale halfway through the morning, and recess on the playground before they go back to learning.

Natasha finds herself sailing into the sky on the swings with some younger kids, feeling not at all foolish for enjoying herself.

* * *

Clint returns with the stunned look of someone who has been run over with a bulldozer—repeatedly.

After dinner they drift separately out to their favorite perch, an old red maple on the side lawn. Natasha glances around—there's some kind of water-balloon-tag going on in the backyard—and then reaches on tiptoe for the lowest limb, springing to pull herself up into the branches. Clint groans.

"Forget it. There's no way." He collapses in the thin grass in the shade of the tree. "Must've run a hundred miles today," he moans.

Natasha hesitates, listening to the screams and laughter drifting on the summer air. "They'll see us."

"I don't care."

She slides back down and settles beside him. His eyes are closed as he slumps against the trunk; there's a bloody scrape on the side of one knee and he smells of sweat and sunshine and crushed grass. "Was it fun?"

"Not yet." He cracks one eyelid. "Yours?"

"It was, actually." The teacher, Mrs. Pulaski, is fluent in Russian and several other languages; Natasha was wrenched with homesickness more than once during the morning, hearing familiar words spoken.

But it had been oddly comforting, as well.

"Cool," Clint murmurs, and falls silent.

They sit without speaking until the lightning bugs appear and the night aide comes out to round them all up.

Natasha has to wake Clint from his open-mouthed snoring against the smooth silver bark.

* * *

The days slide by slow and hot.

They sit together now at meals. No one dares comment on this; even Danny refrains from his usual sex-laden jibes. Natasha suggests Clint not be a complete idiot and to stretch before practice; he in turn badgers her to teach him Russian profanity.

The summer students learn a whole repertoire of words and have begun to master short sentences, though their accents are grating. Natasha teaches them some mild curses as a reward for their progress.

Clint returns a little less wrecked each day. The team plays its first scrimmage; when Frigga drops Clint off that afternoon, Natasha knows they won even before he makes his way up the driveway—she can hear the Odinsons' victory anthem from the front door.

Cherie is released back into Mountainview's custody. Her mandatory counseling keeps her occupied enough that Natasha sees her only at lights-out. The girls pretend not to hear her muffled sobbing in the dark until one day Danny deigns to pinch her backside. The next day, his arm is draped around the back of her neck.

Together the pair of them turn tormenting the younger kids into an art form.

Bruce gets the worst of it.

The 12-year-old is spending his days at the community college, attending a science camp run by a local private-school kid sentenced to community service for some stunt involving a homemade aerial device and violation of airspace, a 100-pound payload of the finest illegal fireworks money can buy, and his girlfriend's birthday.

Tony Stark is possibly under surveillance by various Federal agencies, and he's stuck at home for the summer with a revoked license, a stunning amount of genius, and his absent father's fortune at his disposal.

The result is a science nerd's dream come true.

Tony had latched onto Bruce's intelligence the very first day, and they immediately bond as partners in scientific mayhem. He even has his driver pick up and drop off Bruce, so they have even more time to plot and tinker. Bruce returns with crispy hair and missing eyebrows one day, pinholes through his t-shirt and shorts another.

"So what do you and that freak _do_ all day?" Danny asks one morning, stopping at the table where Bruce is bolting down his cereal.

The boy freezes, gulping at the lump of cereal suddenly caught in his throat. "Eh-experiments," he mumbles.

"Is that what they call it now?" Danny leers, and at his side, Cherie giggles, egging him on. "You know Stark's a perv, right?"

"He is not!"

"Sure he is—why else is he playing with little kids? Little _boys?_"

Bruce flushes and scoots off the side of his chair. When he reaches for his bowl, Danny shoves the chair into him. "I'm not done with you, you little queer."

On the far side of the dining room, Clint draws his slingshot. Natasha grabs his elbow. "Wait! He'll see you!" she hisses, but he draws back the band and fires off a plastic bottle cap in one smooth motion.

Danny squawks and whirls. This time, his eyes settle on Clint half-hidden by the end of the steam table. "I know that was you, Barton! You're dead meat now, man! Dead meat!"

"Knock it off!" yells one of the aides.

In the uproar, Bruce makes his escape. With too many eyes on him, Danny retreats to his table, his eyes hot and murderous.

"I think you have a death wish, Barton," Natasha says conversationally.

"Pretty much, Romanov. Get Thor to sing at my funeral, okay?"

* * *

Mrs. Pulaski organizes a scavenger hunt with the clues all in Russian. It's frantic and hotly contested; Natasha's team is just barely edged out by the teacher's. She and the other kids vow revenge.

The lacrosse team wins its first real game—and then its second, and third. Clint returns with a box of Pop-Tarts, and he and Natasha retreat up into their tree to eat them.

"This is a strange trophy," Natasha says with a gentle spray of brown-sugar-and-cinnamon crumbs.

"Thor likes them. His mom buys them by the pallet at BJ's and passes them out when we win."

Natasha peels open another cellophane packet. "Keep winning."

"Nnggg," Clint agrees.

Below them, Bruce scurries around the corner of the building with a hunted expression. Hot on his trail is Danny and two of his pack, Trey and Jared. "Hey, Banner! How's your _butt-buddy_?"

"Leave me alone." Bruce dodges around the tree but Danny circles to cut him off.

"So do you two homos cook up your own lube in the lab, or just use spit?"

"Lab-lube!" Jared snorts.

"Does it glow in the dark so Stark can see where to stick his _probe_?"

Trey seizes Bruce's wrists, ignoring the younger boy's struggles. "Look at his hands, man! They're _green_! They're usin' some kinda freaky color-gel lube!"

Danny laughs. "I bet his tiny dick is stained." He grabs for Bruce's waistband. "I bet his _ass_… Ow! Fuck!"

Clint's got his legs clamped around the tree branch, freeing his hands to fire projectiles in rapid succession. The boys holler and duck; Bruce wrenches free and takes off in one direction while his tormenters flee in another with their arms shielding their heads.

Natasha is already swinging down from the tree. "C'mon, we've got to move. Hurry, before they come back."

Clint follows, hanging from the branch for a second, then dropping.

"I think you've lost your mind," Natasha comments as they take off running.

"I'm out of ammo," is all he responds.

* * *

Summer League playoffs kick off two weeks before school starts again. Clint's team wins the first round, and then the semi-finals. The entire Eastern seaboard shakes under the power of Thor's unbridled glee.

Summer Enrichment wraps up with a cookout on the school lawn, and afterwards Natasha sits in their tree with Clint and some foil-wrapped burgers she'd lifted.

"So does this mean you'll make the playoff game?" Clint asks around a mouthful of ketchup and charred beef.

"Sure, if Mrs. Odinson doesn't mind giving me a lift."

Clint snorts. "You'll make her day. The more people come watch us play, the happier she is. D'you have earplugs?"

Bruce and a couple of the younger kids come flying around the building, running as if their lives depend on it. Natasha watches Clint watch them, until it's clear they're only playing.

"Why do you defend them so hard?" she asks as he relaxes back against the trunk. "Especially Bruce. Danny knows it's you, now; he's going to kick your ass."

He's quiet so long Natasha thinks he's ignoring her. Finally she hears him release a hitched sigh. "He hasn't got a big brother to do it for him."

"Neither do you."

Another long pause. "I used to," Clint allows at last.

"Oh." The kids are chasing something gleaming gold and red; Natasha thinks it might be a model plane, though none of them are holding a controller. "Is he…?"

"Dead? Nah. He… well, our last foster home was pretty rough. He… took off."

"And left you behind?" Natasha is careful to keep the disapproval out of her voice, to not look at him.

The slingshot is in his hands, turning and turning and turning. "Yeah, pretty much. He did tip off DYFS before he disappeared, so that was okay, I guess. I think they got their license revoked."

"And you ended up here."

"It's not so bad."

He doesn't ask how she ended up at Mountainview; after another minute, Natasha leans forward to snag a Pop-Tart packet. When she settles back, she's careful to let her shoulder rest lightly against his.

* * *

Natasha thinks it's entirely possible for Mrs. Odinson to call down lightning bolts, or perhaps an F-5 tornado, with the power of her voice. When Thor rampages up the field, clearing a swath to the crease, and Clint fires off a breathtaking cherry-picker to an open teammate who drops in the winning goal, she thinks the bleachers will collapse. Mrs. Odinson is roaring and pounding so hard the entire section is rocking, and she's even drowning out the sudden blaring of airhorns from other spectators. Thor is windmilling backslaps onto everyone within range, leaving a heap of purple-and-cream-clad teammates in his wake.

It's all rather glorious, if a tad frightening.

Later, after the teams have shaken hands, after Thor is prevailed on to stop singing long enough for a team photo, after one last bout of bellowing and shoulder-thumping, Thor leads a procession to the back of the Bronco, where Mrs. Odinson passes out Pop-Tarts by the box.

"Was that not a magnificent contest?" Thor asks. He has a box of pastries in each arm and is alternating bites of Frosted Strawberry and Ice Cream Fudge Sundae. He raises one Pop-Tart in a salute. "A victory party! Mother, we must have a triumphal fete to celebrate this occasion!"

"Of course, darling! Labor Day, perhaps? We can roast a pig."

Thor raises his voice to an even more ear-splitting volume. "All are invited! Bring friends! My domicile on Monday!" He smiles at Natasha, staying out of the crush on the outskirts of the crowd. "And you, of course, fair maiden! The Hawk must bring his Lady to our revelries!"

Later still, they slip around the back of Mountainview and up into the tree. Clint is favoring his ribs, and he winces whenever he has to move his left arm; both of them have low-grade headaches and ringing ears.

Natasha lets her heels swing and thump lightly. "_'_Hawk_'_?" she asks with a lifted eyebrow.

Color rises under Clint's tan. "_'_Hawkeye_'_, actually. 'Cuz I can spot and hit an open target clear downfield." He scrubs his hand through his hair. "Thor's got nicknames for everyone—Gait is Rocket, Tucker is Dex, for ambidextrous, Eliuk is The Wall. He calls them our 'battle callsigns'."

Twilight is sinking rapidly into night; around them the last of the season's fireflies are rising and dipping. Natasha stretches out one foot and nudges Clint's ankle. "_'_Hawkeye_'_," she says, and lets him hear the smile in her voice.

* * *

The last time Natasha was at a lavish party she had worn a velvet-and-lace dress, patent leather slippers, and her hair in ringleted ponytails. Uncle Alex had had his eye on a mark with a weakness for old-fashioned little girls.

She still can't smell licorice without a hellish shiver creeping up her spine.

Thor's victory fete is sure to be nothing like that stifling event; Clint says they have a pool, and Natasha can't wait to see what a whole roasting pig looks like. Mrs. Odinson has ordered a double vanilla sheetcake with purple frosting from the best bakery in town.

They're killing time in their tree the day before Labor Day when the trouble starts.

At first, the raised voices don't register; Danny and his pack had been shooting hoops, and that inevitably leads to cursing and trashtalk. After a moment it becomes obvious the voices are younger and higher. Clint is just straightening to alertness when an agonized scream cuts through the yard.

Clint is out of the tree before it fades, Natasha on his heels. They round the building at a dead run.

Danny is laughing, waving pieces of a red-and-gold _something_. Bruce is white-faced before him, and Natasha knows, she knows what the object is—it's the working model rocket Tony Stark and Bruce built during their extra science camp hours. Somehow it actually flies, without batteries, without a controller—Bruce guides it with a sort of digital wristwatch he wears perpetually, and it's his prized possession.

And now it's crushed in Danny's hands, and Danny's laughing, and he's taunting the boy over his loss.

"Aww, poor baby faggot, did your boyfriend's wedding present break? Does he know you fondle it when he's not around for you to jerk off?" He tosses the casing to the ground. "Did he fuck you with it, is that how come you're all boo-hoo-hoo about it?" He laughs again, and Trey and Jared join in.

Bruce is pushed beyond breaking—he lets out a scream and launches himself at Danny. The older boy staggers back; he drops the pieces of rocket and shoves Bruce away.

"Little fairy—you fight like a girl. You gonna _slap _me?"

Bruce charges a second time, bowling head-first into Danny. Danny grunts, and curses; there's a thud and Bruce is on the ground.

"Like a _girl_," Danny taunts. "That's what happens when you let ass-munchers fuck you like a girl—you turn into one."

Bruce springs up and spits full into Danny's face.

There's a split second of shocked silence. Natasha moves to get in front of Bruce and Trey cuts her off, holding her back. Danny swipes his hand down his face and stares at it in disbelief. "You little faggot—you trying to give me AIDs?"

His foot lashes out and catches Bruce low in the stomach.

He doesn't stop even though Bruce crumples. Natasha is yelling and Trey is fending her off and shouting hoarsely at Danny to back off and Danny is spewing a stream of filth at Bruce while he whales on him.

"**Hey!**" Clint's bellow cuts through the clamor and Natasha turns and he's bending, scooping something off the ground, his slingshot out and drawn…

Danny screams and now there's blood everywhere, blood pouring down his face. He lands on his knees, cradling his forehead, and suddenly there are aides and even the weekend supervisor, someone is blowing a whistle, someone is yelling, yelling terribly. There are more screams, and grunts, and jostling. Natasha is knocked aside; she tries to crawl to Clint but he's buried beneath Trey and Jared and the kitchen aide.

Bruce is pulling himself across the ground, out of the fray. Natasha goes to him—there's blood on his mouth and he looks at her with haunted eyes.

"I'm sorry," he moans. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

Natasha sits, and he leans his forehead on her shoulder and cries.

* * *

ff dot net's document manager keeps randomly stripping out punctuation; I think I caught it all.

Part 3 to come shortly.


	3. Three to get ready

Spoiler here at the top; scroll down to the first break if you want to read on without it; read the spoiler if non-con is an issue for you.

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This chapter contains references to possible non-con. I've left it vague as to whether Clint was actually raped in juvie or managed to fight off his attackers before penetration took place. You can read it as either/or, depending on how much trauma you want. He's also about 16, if his age makes a difference to you.

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* * *

Natasha starts sophomore year alone.

She waits for the bus, she shows up for class, she hands in her work… but she's only going through the motions because there's nothing else she can do. She stares at the world out of blank eyes; there's a deadness in her middle that hasn't been this heavy since the day DYFS knocked on the apartment door and told her Uncle Alex wasn't coming back.

The police had taken Clint away in handcuffs.

An ambulance had whisked Danny off to the hospital, but he'd returned late that same night with only a gauze patch taped near his hairline; he hadn't even needed stitches, but head wounds—especially from a slung rock—bleed heavily, and he plays the victim well.

The paramedics had checked over Bruce and declared him "bruised, but fine", which makes Natasha seethe and want to rip skin from faces. She'd recounted Danny's abuse of the younger boys in graphic detail, but no one interviewing the witnesses in the aftermath seems overly concerned.

Danny is offered extra counseling; Bruce is warned that refusing to share in a group home situation can have consequences.

Natasha banks her fury and waits.

* * *

The guidance counselor calls her into the office two weeks into the new school year.

"Ms. Martinez advised me that you participated as a student assistant in Summer Enrichment this year," he tells Natasha as she sinks into a chair. She has to check his name plate—Mr. Wieller—because she's never had contact with anyone in the office before. She wonders vaguely where his sudden interest is coming from. "And Mrs. Pulaski gave you high praise, both for your attitude and for your skill, in, Russian, was it? Yes." Mr. Wieller checks the screen of his computer. "On their recommendations, I'll be issuing you one extra class credit for this semester."

Natasha remembers Ms. Martinez saying something about that, way back at the beginning of summer. It doesn't seem to matter anymore, but, "Okay," she says, because the counselor seems to be waiting for a response.

"This means you have one less language arts credit to earn for graduation. Would you like to adjust your schedule in any way? You could drop one of your mandatory classes—as long as it's one in the Language Arts or Social Sciences departments—and replace it with an elective."

It all seems so pointless; Natasha shrugs.

Mr. Wieller is scrolling through screens. "I see your electives this semester are in poetry, and social media—you're equally interested in these subjects?"

"Not really; I had to pick something, and those were the only classes left by the time I got scheduled."

Mr. Wieller nods. "What sort of things do you really enjoy? Maybe we can find something else. A different science? Computer arts?"

_Tree climbing_, Natasha thinks. _Breaking and entering_. Her stomach lurches. _Target acquisition._

"I know Russian was your primary language so of course you'd be fluent, but are you interested in any others? Sometimes a mastery of dual languages can indicate an aptitude for more."

A memory stirs dully in the back of Natasha's brain. "French," she says slowly. "We lived in Montreal for a while when I was little, and I picked up some French."

"Wonderful! I can certainly fit you into a French 1 class I if you like."

"…and Portuguese; I knew some Portuguese, too." That was from the stint before Montreal, when she was nine and they were staying near Boston and Uncle Alex almost got gutted one night in a fish processing plant.

That was how they'd ended up in Canada, as a matter of fact.

"Well, we don't offer Portuguese, but we do have Italian, which isn't the same but might challenge you. If you finish your other mandatory mathematics and science classes this year, you could conceivably take two languages Junior year."

Natasha can't bear to think about getting through this year, let alone next, but she nods. French at least will be familiar.

Her life is all aching memories anyway.

* * *

After a week, Madame sends Natasha back to Guidance to be switched from French 1 to 3. She despairs of Natasha's accent—picked up on the streets of the Red Light District—but says Natasha has a gift.

* * *

Bruce runs away the first week in October.

He's picked up by New York Highway Patrol heading north, with Google Map directions in his pocket to a tiny town on the Connecticut border whose only claim to fame is an ultra-exclusive private school with a focus on engineering.

After a night in an emergency shelter, he's returned to Mountainview.

* * *

Madame stops Natasha after class one day in October.

"Are you interested in tutoring?"

"Tutoring? Me?"

"Oui." Madame nods emphatically. "Your accent has improved dramatically, and there is a first-year student who could use extra practice. There is no pay—it is volunteer peer tutoring only—but if you prove proficient it could lead to private students for you eventually. You could earn extra money toward college."

"College?" College is a fantastical notion Natasha has never entertained.

"But of course. You have a gift, child. I have no doubt that should you nurture it, you could speak a dozen languages. Travel, become a translator—why, you could live anywhere in the world."

"I _live_ at Mountainview," Natasha says bluntly.

"And so? You are adept and have patience; you do not laugh at others' mistakes. I have no qualms in recommending you."

"I don't have transportation."

"Then you meet after school and take the late bus home. Shall I arrange a trial period? Say, two weeks, and if it doesn't work out, there is no further obligation."

At the least, it will get her out of Danny's presence a few extra hours a week, Natasha reasons. "It's a deal."

* * *

They meet in a tutoring cubicle in the school library, two days a week. Brian tries hard, but his progress is slow to non-existent. It's pleasant enough in the after-hours building, though; a few clubs have meetings, the gym is always busy, the distant sounds of football and marching band practice filter in from the fields, but the school is largely empty.

After Brian leaves to meet his father in the parking lot, Natasha wanders the halls, trailing her fingers along the bricks and peering into darkened classrooms until it's time for the bus.

Circling down a side corridor one day, she's nearly flattened by a force of nature in the form of Thor. He's talking—or perhaps proclaiming is more accurate—to a tall, broad, all-American blond. Something about the glory and honor of participation in thespian arts, Natasha hears, before she bounces off Thor's massive chest.

"My pardon!—Natasha Romanov? Natasha! Well met, fair maiden! Are you injured?"

She's hoisted by two huge hands and set gently on her feet. Thor's beaming at her and his companion smiles apologetically.

"No, I'm fine. Hello, Thor."

"This is Steve Rogers, a fine companion and even finer artist. I'm prevailing upon him to assist in the painting of sets for the musical!"

She recognizes him—or the back of his neck, anyway—from homeroom; he sits two desks in front of her. "Hi."

"Hello." Steve Rogers shakes hands like a gentleman, and his eyes never drop below her neck. Natasha's impressed.

Thor places his hand over his heart and drops his voice from 'yelling on the deck of an aircraft carrier' to merely 'conversing in a thunderstorm'. "Fair maiden, I was grieved to hear of Hawkeye's troubles. I pray he will be among us again soon."

Natasha nods stiffly. "Thank you."

"My mother says he does well enough, but she can see it goes hard for him."

Natasha looks up sharply. "Your mother? She's seen Barton?"

"Of course. She visited him as soon as they allowed it. She tried to bring him our victory photo, but it was confiscated. We're keeping it safe until his return."

There's a lump in her throat that threatens to choke her. "That… that was good of her. Tell her I said thank you. Tell her… it means a lot."

"He is a friend and a brother in arms. Would that I could visit as well, but I am not yet an adult." Thor touches her so gently on the shoulder that Natasha staggers only a little. "Have faith, fair one."

Faith has always been in short supply, as has friendship, but Natasha suddenly feels a tiny, unfamiliar flicker of both.

* * *

On the bitter, sleety last day of winter break, Clint is released from juvenile detention and returned to Mountainview.

Natasha hears hurried footsteps and whispers in the hall outside the library, and she rolls out of her limp beanbag seat to see what's happening. She pushes through the crowd peering around the corner to the main entrance and there he is—hair just outgrowing a severe buzz cut, hands buried in the pockets of a too-thin orange windbreaker, being escorted to the director's office by a square-jawed man wearing ridiculously pointy cowboy boots.

The door closes behind them and stays that way for nearly an hour.

By the time the door finally opens again, all the other residents have drifted away, save Natasha, vigilant at her post. The cowboy-booted man swings out the front door and Natasha ducks around the corner as the director guides Clint with a hand in the middle of his back.

"Barton?"

He keeps heading toward the boys' wing. The director glances over her shoulder. "Go on back to the common area."

Natasha ignores her, tries to slip past and get in front of them. There's a half-healed scrape along Clint's jaw, and the yellowing remains of a shiner encircling one eye. "_Barton_."

He won't meet her gaze. "Later, Ms. Romanov," the director says firmly, and she can only stand and watch as Clint is urged away down the hall.

* * *

His gaze barely flicks up at her when she sets her tray down at his table, and then he goes back to his dinner, half-hunched over his plate. His eyes dart to the side, first left, then right, as he eats.

"Are you okay?"

Another of those quick, flicking glances. "Sure." He makes a visible effort to keep talking. "Just hungry. Food's better here, believe it or not."

"I didn't see you today."

"My classes are all in the upperclassmen wing now. I earned enough credits last year to get moved back to eleventh grade."

"Oh. Well, that's good." Natasha sometimes forgets Clint's a year older than she is.

Eyes flick left, then right. "Sure. Might actually graduate next year."

"You want…" _to hang out with me still? _Natasha longs to ask, but settles for "…to practice some shots after school?"

"They took my slingshot," he answers offhandedly.

"Oh, shit. I'm sorry."

"Doesn't matter." He shrugs, and his eyes pan around the room again before he slides his chair back and rises. "I'm kind of tired. I'm going to crash early."

There are smudges under his eyes, and creases between his eyebrows; he probably _could_ use some extra rest. "Okay. I'll see you tomorrow."

"Sure. G'night."

* * *

"Here." Natasha thrusts a rolled bundle into Clint's hands just before he heads out to the bus stop in the morning. "I got this down for you last night."

Slowly he unrolls the coat and shakes it out. For a second pain spasms across his face; and then it wipes to blankness again. "Thanks." He slides his arms into the sleeves and settles it across his shoulders. It's not quite as baggy on him as when he stored it away. He zips it up and sinks his chin into the collar.

"We should go up into the ceiling tonight, make sure all your vantage points are still accessible."

"Doesn't matter; I don't have anything to shoot with."

"We could just scout around. You probably shouldn't pop anyone anyway, they'll know it's you now."

"The bus is coming." Abruptly he turns away and heads out the door.

* * *

Natasha searches all their usual bolt holes when she comes back from tutorial the following day, but Clint is in none of them. She finally tracks him down in his room; he's pushed his bed flat against one wall and is lying with his back in the angle between mattress and wall, facing the door. She's not supposed to be in the boys' wing, but this is getting ridiculous.

"Barton. Move your ass. Come see what I've got."

The circles under his eyes have darkened and his mouth is thinned with exhaustion. "What is it?"

"Come out to the commons, I'm going to get busted."

He shakes his head. "I'm awful wrecked, Romanov. Just show me."

"Okay, fine, but then you've got to come out and try them out." With a flourish, she draws a handful of papers from behind her back. "Ta-da! New targets! There's a color printer in the computer lab." She fans them out proudly.

A light flickers briefly in his eyes, then dies. "Nothing to shoot with."

Natasha has a rejoinder to that, too. She holds out a fistful of rubber bands and a package of Blu-tack. "Office supplies from the library. C'mon, come show me what you've got."

He shakes his head. "Maybe later. Anyway, the Blu-tack will stick to the rubber."

"It's all I could find. I don't know where you find your ammo. I bet if you snap the rubber bands hard enough, you can overcome the tacky."

"Maybe later."

Natasha stands quietly in the door for a long moment. Clint's not even looking at her any more; she doesn't know what he's seeing with that far-away gaze. Finally she lets her hands drop. "Okay, Barton," she says softly, and turns to go.

* * *

The next afternoon she slips through the back doors of the auditorium. The lights are up on stage, and there are kids crawling around putting down masking tape marks on the boards under a senior girl's direction. There's hammering coming from backstage, the smell of paint, the sound of someone's I-pod cranked to eleven. "I'm going to need a spot _here,_" the senior yells over the noise, pointing. "That one's _out_, I told you!" someone else yells from the light board.

Natasha chooses a seat at random and watches until practice wraps for the day.

Thor comes out with a girl in glasses who's talking a mile a minute, and Steve, who's got a smear of grey paint on the top of his head and down one shoulder, but when he sees Natasha waiting, Thor claps the other boy on the back and takes his leave of the two of them.

Natasha meets him halfway down the aisle. "I need your help."

* * *

He's lying on his bed again when she comes looking for him. His roommates—a 12-year-old, and two 13-year-olds, one of whom is new to Mountainview—rise quickly when they see Natasha at the door and slip out past her. Clint's face is drawn; he'd tensed when she appeared in the doorway, but now he sags back against the mattress.

Natasha approaches the bed. "Here," she says, and lays a newly-constructed slingshot on the bed by his hand. "I don't care if you don't want to use it anymore, I just wanted you to have it. Thor helped me, and Steve Rogers from my homeroom; he had the saw for the tree branch and the leather for the pouch. Mrs. Odinson drove us across town to get rubber tubing for the bands, and Steve's girlfriend Peggy gave me these." She sets a ziploc bag full of round yellow pellets on the bed. "Her little brother has a pellet gun and she says these are usually soft enough not to hurt."

Clint's staring at the slingshot with an unreadable expression. Natasha spins on her heel and flees, so she doesn't have to see him throw the slingshot back at her, or, worse yet, turn away from it in disinterest.

* * *

It's raining when the late bus lets her off after tutorial the next day. Natasha bends her head against the freezing onslaught and starts to slog up the driveway.

Someone steps out of the dripping treeline.

"Wanna set up some targets for me, Romanov? I'm so damn rusty it's not even funny."

* * *

She shouldn't be surprised, Natasha reflects, marking her place in her French novel and letting it fall to her lap. Thor is remarkably persuasive when he's convinced someone should do something.

Like join Tech Crew and climb around the rafters replacing spotlight bulbs and recalibrating the light boxes.

Natasha tilts her head against the padded seatback even though all she can see of Clint is disembodied shadows flitting across the stage and curtains.

"It's still too low," Melissa, the student director, calls from the stage.

"I'm not done yet," Clint's voice floats down.

The Hot Box Girls high-kick across the stage, heels clacking. The one on the left is still lagging, Natasha notes.

"I need my Adelaide spotlighted for this number," Melissa calls up.

"I'm not done yet," Clint repeats. Something up in the catwalk sizzles and snaps.

"Are you an electrician?"

"No, I'm the guy who doesn't get acrophobia hanging from his knees fifty feet above a hard wooden floor."

Natasha grins. The Hot Box Girl on the left turns the wrong direction and clips her neighbor. The clatter of their heels breaks down into discordance as they sort themselves out. There's a resonant _pop_ overhead, and the center spot blazes on; 'Adelaide' squeals in delight, leaping into the circle of light.

"From the top, Girls. Adelaide, don't chase the spot, it'll follow you."

Later Natasha waves goodnight to Peggy and Steve as they split off at the parking lot, hands linked. Frigga is waiting in the Bronco to drop Natasha and Clint at Mountainview before heading home with her son; she'd insisted she wouldn't be happy unless she could drive them after practice, so Natasha stays after school to do her homework while Thor rehearses and Clint crawls around the ceiling.

She's _not_ keeping an eye on Clint.

Even if he still looks like a walking corpse most days.

The car slows at their destination. "Thanks for the ride, Mrs. Odinson."

"You're quite welcome, Clint, darling. Oh! Natasha, is that _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ you're reading?"

Natasha waves Clint on toward the group home and hands Frigga her novel. As soon as Clint is out of earshot, Frigga hands it back. "He's still not sleeping?"

"No, ma'am."

"He's going to do himself an injury if he keeps this up."

"He says he's fine."

"Well, he's wrong. Men! You're an assemblage of obstinate dunderheads!" Frigga lovingly cuffs Thor on the head.

"Indeed," Thor agrees. "Hawkeye needs a rousing lacrosse game to render him temporarily unconscious."

"The field is shrouded in ice—you'll break your legs even before opening night," Frigga objects.

"Goodnight, Mrs. Odinson, Thor," Natasha says hastily, exiting the car and leaving them to their good-natured bickering.

_She's right, though_, Natasha thinks, plodding up to the front door. _He's going to crash one of these days. Or miss his footing and fall off the catwalk._

That outcome is unacceptable.

* * *

The window catches, then jerks upward with a scrape that makes Natasha wince. She swings down from the gutter, hooks her legs over the sill, and pulls herself into the room.

Four pairs of eyes gleam, startled, in the scant light reflected from the snow-covered outdoors.

"Don't mind me," Natasha whispers. She dusts gritty snow off her hands and turns to push the window closed. When she turns back, only one pair of eyes flash in the darkness.

"What are you doing, Romanov?"

"Shhh." She crosses the room on silent feet. At the side of Clint's bed, she toes off her shoes and lifts the blanket. "Shove over."

He hesitates so long Natasha thinks he isn't going to, but finally the sheets rustle and the mattress shifts. She slides into the narrow bed beside him.

He's fully dressed, not even wearing sweatpants but jeans instead. She adjusts so she's not half-hanging off the mattress and tucks one arm behind her head.

"Here's the deal. I'm going to stay awake—I used to pull all-nighters with my Uncle Alex all the time, when I was just nine and ten and eleven. I'm nearly 15 now, this'll be a cinch. You're going to let go and go to sleep." She lowers her voice so his roommates won't overhear. "I'll have your back, Barton."

She can hear his fast, shallow breaths in the darkness. "I'll try," he whispers at last.

She nods and scoots up so she's sitting against the headboard, the better to stay awake. "Got your back," she breathes.

"I know."

* * *

She does doze off at one point, but only lightly, and only for a short time. And then Clint startles in his sleep and she snaps awake in reflex.

He's got one arm draped over her knees.

She rolls her neck and rubs at her sandy eyes and takes a couple of deep breaths. Clint's arm is heavy, but so is the rhythm of his breathing and there's no way in hell she's disturbing him.

She counts in French, backwards, and searches her memory for wisps of Portuguese, and translates the lyrics of _Fugue for Tinhorns_ into Russian. The rectangle of window changes from pitch black to dark grey in the space it takes her to blink her eyes.

Clint startles again, and this time she feels him awaken. His breathing changes and then he draws his arm back.

"Sorry." His voice is a soft rasp.

"It's fine."

"You should probably go. It's almost dawn."

"I know." But Natasha doesn't move. She can hear his roommates breathing, slowly, evenly, one with a slight whistle to his exhales. "Did they hurt you?" she whispers in a helpless blurt.

If she weren't pressed up against him, the tiny, involuntary jump of his muscles would go unnoticed. "Nah," he says though, carelessly, as if the question is foolish. Natasha touches the side of his jaw where the scrape had been, and "It was just a scuffle, that's all. Couple of guys blowing off steam," he answers, voice still casual.

She sits in the slowly brightening room until she knows she must leave or be caught, listening to her friend breathe. At last she lifts the blanket and swings her legs to the floor, feeling for her shoes.

At the window, she turns back. "Remember their names," she commands, low. "Remember, because I'm going to find them someday, and kill them."

* * *

ff dot net's document manager continues to plague me, but I think I fixed all the punctuation and italics.

The fourth and final part will, god willin' and the creek don't rise, be up on the weekend.

Thank you for reading!


	4. And four to go

Okay, so I lied- turns out I'm having wayyy too much fun beating the snot out of poor Clint, so this is not the final chapter after all, there will be at least one more. Umm, sorry?

Violence and strong homophobic language in this one. On with the show.

* * *

"How'd dress rehearsal go?" Natasha asks when Clint sticks his head in the library late that afternoon. He makes a face.

"That one Hot Box Girl fell off the dance floor again, Coulson came by and deep-sixed the dry ice for the Cuba scenes, Dev did the whole _Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat_ number wearing two different shoes, and Melissa had three meltdowns."

"That's one less than yesterday. Did they get the programs sorted?"

"Yeah, Darcy fixed the printer, but the magenta cartridge burst all over her first." Clint nods toward the rec room. "How come all the kids are next door?"

"Oh, Trey had an away game and Danny's got Saturday detention again. They're having a Kart tournament while they have the chance."

"They better wrap it up, I think Danny was right behind me."

Sure enough, they hear the rec room door slam open, hard enough to shake the connecting wall. "Who said you could use that, Rocket Dildo?" Danny barks.

Clint's face turns grim and he wheels out of the library. Natasha surges up out of her beanbag to follow.

Danny's looming over Bruce and Ritchie, one of Clint's roommates. The other kids are scrambling for the door and as Clint squeezes in past them, Danny rips the controller out of Bruce's hand and holds it above his head.

Bruce has gone pale, but he takes a shaky step toward Danny. "G-give it back, we're not d-done yet."

"Yes, you are," Danny snarls. "I don't wanna use something you've had your faggy hands on."

Clint reaches up and plucks the controller right out of Danny's grasp. "Easy solution—don't touch this."

Danny whips around. "Oh, hey, someone's begging for a beatdown." He rolls one fist inside the other, cracking his knuckles.

Clint passes the controller back to Bruce, never taking his eyes from Danny's. "Try it," he says softly.

"Ooo, look who's a tough guy."

"I'm not; I'm just not afraid of you."

"You should be." Danny still has his lips peeled back in a sneer, and he shifts from one foot to the other. "I can _kick your ass_."

Clint looks at him with deadly calm. "No," he says flatly. "You can't."

Danny's sneer slips. He shifts again, but the motion is no longer the same sinuous sway as before. He flicks his eyes to Natasha, and she thinks his feeble brain has suddenly caught up to just where Clint had been for four long months. He flicks his gaze back to Clint. "You're just talking big because you've got backup."

"You'd know about that, wouldn't you?"

"You saying I fight dirty?"

Clint shrugs and steps aside, leaving a clear path to the door. "I don't need to say it."

Danny opens his mouth, closes it again; Clint's flat stare never wavers. Finally Danny takes a sideways step toward the door. "You're not worth missing dinner over," he blusters. He squares his shoulders. "You better sleep with one eye open, though, asshole." He takes another step, and when Clint doesn't move, he swaggers out.

Natasha lets out the breath she was holding. Clint quirks a half smile at her. "Guess he doesn't know I've been sleeping with _two _eyes open, huh, Romanov?"

* * *

Opening night.

Clint comes out to the entryway wearing his blacks and Natasha gets the oddest swooping feeling in her stomach at the sight. His hair's grown out enough to need cutting; he pushes impatiently at the strands hanging over his eyes and she can't stop looking at the pull of dark cloth over his arms.

"Mrs. Odinson here yet?"

She gives herself a mental kick. "No, but probably any minute now."

"You have your ticket?"

Natasha pats her coat pocket. "Are you nervous?"

"Me? Nah. All I have to do is sit in the ceiling and point the lights. Thor threw up at last call, though."

"_Thor_ did?"

"Yeah. His dad's coming tonight; I guess it's a big deal."

"It _is_ a big deal—he's only a sophomore and he's got one of the leads."

Headlights swing into the driveway, and they go out to meet the car. Mrs. Odinson's greeting is at a much lower volume than usual, possibly because Thor's sitting with a bucket in his lap. The trip to the school is subdued.

"We'll be back at showtime," Mrs. Odinson says when she drops them off, and she smiles encouragingly as she pulls away from the curb. Clint and Thor turn toward the backstage entrance and Natasha rises on tiptoe and places her hands on either side of Thor's clammy face.

"Break a leg," she says gently. He nods wordlessly. "You too, Barton."

Clint waves jauntily and then he's herding Thor and his bucket through the stage door. Natasha heads for the front of the house.

There's not an empty seat in the place.

The curtain goes up and the audience "Ooo's" at the backdrops; the soaring cityscapes look almost three-dimensional. A shiver of pride goes through Natasha that Steve's work has prompted such a reaction. The music rises and even though she's been watching rehearsals for weeks and knows it nearly as well as the cast and crew, suddenly it's a brand-new show, steeped in magic.

Thor's rendition of _Luck Be a Lady_ brings down the house.

The applause at the end is thunderous. Melissa looks like she's going to pass out; when someone hands the girl playing Sarah Brown a bouquet of roses, she hugs them to her chest, too overcome to notice the thorns. There are two curtain calls and "Benny Southstreet" grabs "Nathan Detroit" after the second and bends him backward to plant a kiss on his mouth. The curtain falls on another round of cheers and applause.

Natasha works her way through the packed corridors to the backstage hall. The cast and crew are whooping, jumping to hug each other and family and friends who have found their way around back. Camera phones flash non-stop and one dad is filming the whole thing for posterity on a tiny video camera.

She ducks through the press of bodies. Backstage, the props mistress looks up from placing discarded costumes on hangers and points. "He's still in his nest."

Natasha climbs the iron ladder leading to the catwalks. Clint's just finished shutting down the last of the spots, and he peels off his gloves and spins at the faint clang of her feet against metal. "Hey."

"Hey." She knows he's not going to want to face the crowd below, so she settles crosslegged on the floor. "It's a mob scene down there."

"I bet; the cheering was so loud, the lights were flickering." There's a water bottle rolling about by his feet and he scoops it up and offers it to her, twisting the cap and draining it when she shakes her head. "How did it look from the seats?"

"Oh, you know…" Natasha shrugs exaggeratedly. "It was pretty good. The lighting totally sucked, though—they must have had somebody who was cross-eyed and all thumbs trying to… Hey!" She ducks at the empty water bottle that's lobbed at her head.

"Brat."

"Oh, stuff it, Barton. You know you were awesome."

* * *

Natasha kills time in the theater while Clint and the rest of the crew strike the sets. She can hear Thor—he's helping knock apart the platform the Cuba fountain had rested on—extolling the virtues of signing up for the school's spring lacrosse season. Clint's coiling up cords and being stubbornly noncommittal, but Natasha has no doubt the following week will see him running up and down a field in blue-and-white shorts with Thor bellowing alongside him.

She doesn't really see a downside to that.

Bruce is waiting for them when they get back to Mountainview.

"Um, you should know… Danny's, uh, saying stuff. To Ritchie. About how you're his roommate and Ritchie's f-fresh meat, and…" Bruce's face pales and then flushes red. "…and people who do theater are fags," he finishes in a rush. "He was talking about Ty and Keith kissing and said you were gonna… that you…"

"I get it," Clint cuts him off. "It's okay. Thanks, Bruce."

"Barton, what are you going to do?" Natasha asks worriedly as Bruce slips away.

"Nothing."

"I don't believe you."

"I won't have to do anything. Just watch."

He walks up to Danny's table at dinner. It's noisy as usual—Danny's boasting about something or other around mouthfuls of food and Cherie's leaning her head on his shoulder and giggling at every other word. Natasha wonders how she can keep up such an exhausting act. Trey spots Clint first and then the rest of the table falls silent; even Cherie sobers and straightens.

"…an' I said, No, fuck you, man, fuck…" Danny breaks off and looks up at the sudden stillness around him.

Clint stops beside his chair. "I hear you've got something to say about me."

"What's your problem?" Danny blusters. "Fuck off."

"I hear," and Clint rests one curled fist on the table by Danny's elbow, "you've got something to say about me."

"Man, you're crazy. Full-on mental. Get the fuck outta my face."

Clint nods. "That's what I thought," he says quietly. "You _don't _have anything to say." He stares at Danny until the other shifts in his seat, and then turns and walks off to pick up a tray.

"There's that death wish of yours again, Barton," Natasha comments once they're seated. Behind them, Danny's muttering and throwing evil glances at Clint.

"Nah, it's cool," he says, twirling up a forkful of spaghetti.

"It's not cool—you're freaking him out. He's going to explode."

Clint merely looks thoughtful. "Huh. You think?"

Natasha _really _doesn't like the glint in his eye.

* * *

Whatever Clint's up to, he keeps at it as the weather slowly warms. He never makes the slightest threatening move towards Danny—he simply _looks_ at him, calmly, levelly. Even when Danny 'accidentally' bumps him in passing, or clips him with his backpack in the bus aisle, Clint just turns slowly and studies Danny as if he's an interesting specimen of bug.

Cracks start to appear in Danny's swaggering façade.

For spring break, the younger kids are taken to see the latest CGI-animated film. They come back from the movie theater chattering and excited, wired on candy and popcorn, neon-bright rings around their mouths from slushees. Danny's drawn like a wasp to sugar to their happy commotion, compelled to crush it as only he knows how. Within seconds, he zeros in on a passing comment.

"You played Dance Dance Revolution? What a bunch of fairies! Little gay boys bouncing around to faggot music!" He laughs raucously as the boys' faces fall. "So did you dance with your hands down each others' pants?"

The boys' expressions clear. Danny frowns and whirls and finds himself face to face with Clint.

"Problem?" Clint asks evenly.

Danny wrenches aside. "Get the fuck away from me!"

Clint watches until he hurries off to another part of the building.

* * *

"What are you doing, Barton?" Natasha demands.

He gazes serenely back at her. "Nothing, Romanov—I'm not doing anything at all."

* * *

The lacrosse team starts racking up wins from their very first game, and Clint and Natasha revive their tradition of sitting up in their tree to eat Pop-Tarts afterward. Mrs. Odinson insists on driving them home from both games and practice, so Natasha makes a habit of trekking out to the field after tutorial.

She's watching for the skill and strategy, of course—her interest has nothing to do with the two dozen boys with runners' legs, wearing nylon shorts, trotting back and forth before the bleachers.

The baseball team is usually practicing on the diamond behind the lacrosse field, so she gets a double dose of eye-candy… if she were interested in that sort of thing. Steve Rogers is the captain and starting pitcher, and the sight of him on the mound winding up a pitch or sprinting around the bases is nothing short of God-bless-America inspiring.

"Were you drooling at Rogers?" Clint asks incredulously.

"No!"

"You were! I can see when you turn around to look, you know."

"I had to see what was happening—there was cheering. He's got a pretty mean swing."

"Since when do you follow baseball?"

_Since when do you care?_ Natasha wonders.

* * *

Another school year draws to a close. Freshman Day arrives, when the eighth graders from the middle schools are bussed over to spend a day on the high school campus and become familiar with the layout and the classes and extracurriculars offered. The teachers draft volunteers to act as guides and give presentations. Madame asks Natasha to stay and introduce the language art program, and Thor harries Clint into manning the lacrosse field to dazzle potential new recruits, since he'll be in the theater to talk up the drama program.

There's pizza in the cafeteria, and the Home Arts class bake sale fills the south wing with the scent of warm chocolate and cinnamon.

The hallways empty out after the last bell. Natasha snags a napkin full of M&M cookies and then wanders out to the fields. She can see Steve in his red-and-blue uniform giving a group of rising freshmen pointers out on the diamond, and there's another group of them taking turns firing lacrosse balls into an open net.

"Hi, Natasha!"

She turns; Bruce trots up behind her, a thick wad of papers in his hand.

"The chem lab is pretty cool, but it's not as nice as the one Tony set up last summer. They said freshmen don't usually get to take chemistry but I tested up and they're going to let me in anyway. They've got reciprocal classes with Valley College, so once I max out my credits here, I can do some semesters over there. They've got a physics program that's pretty rad, too."

Natasha's never heard Bruce talk so much at once. "That sounds, um, fun."

"Yeah! Once I get my student email set up, Tony's going to send me his notes; he's working on something really cool. I already talked to the head of the science department, and she says once I pass the mandatory junk I can do independent study and work out my own projects." He glances up, spots the activity on the field they're approaching. "Are you going to see Clint?"

"Uh-huh. He's showing off lacrosse stuff."

"Oh, cool. Do you think there's a radar gun on campus? I wonder how fast they can fire those balls."

"Yeahhh, it's all about the balls with you, isn't it, Banner?"

They both freeze and whirl around. Danny swaggers up behind them, a towel draped around his neck, and Natasha remembers that since Trey got busy with the basketball team, Danny started spending time in the weight room whenever he didn't have detention. There's a sheen of sweat on his arms, exposed by the baggy sleeveless tank he's wearing, and his shoulders and legs have grown heavier with muscle definition.

"How's your science boyfriend gonna feel when he finds out you've thrown him over for some dumb jock? Oh, hey, maybe you can have a threesome—you've learned how to take it _and _suck like a hoover, I betcha."

Natasha touches Bruce's arm and urges him into motion. They're almost to the field; once they're within earshot of Clint and the rest of the team, Danny's sure to shut up.

"Man, I bet that Stark freak really misses that tender little ass of yours. Likes his boys young, doesn't he? Uh-oh, what if he's pounding a fresh new butt-buddy up in that fancy private school of his?"

He's on too much of a roll to give up. Bruce is swallowing hard and trying not to look at him and hurrying to keep ahead of Danny and Danny kicks out and gets one foot twisted between Bruce's ankles. Bruce goes down in a flurry of arms and legs; his papers swirl away across the grass.

"That's right, queer-bait, on your knees with your cheeks spread wide. Point that ass that way, there's theater fags waitin' for a show."

"For someone who wants everybody to think you're straight, you sure spend a lot of time talking about guys' asses."

Danny's head shoots up. Clint's striding towards them, his lacrosse stick discarded on the sideline. Natasha pulls Bruce to his feet and angles her body between him and Danny.

"What did you say?"

Clint comes to a halt in front of Danny, his arms hanging loose by his sides. "I said, you're always talking about asses. And balls. And blow-jobs. It's like a theme with you."

"Shut the fuck up."

"Are you curious? Is that it? You think if you talk about guys blowing each other enough, someone'll offer to do you?"

"Barton, shut up." Natasha reaches behind her, pushes Bruce further back. Her napkin full of cookies crunches under her feet. A horrible fear is bearing down on her like a freight train—she can see it coming, she just can't stop it.

"Yeah, Barton, shut up." Danny whips the towel from around his neck and lets it fall. "You think you're the big man 'cuz you were in juvie? You're not so hardass; I bet they had your pants around your ankles the first night."

All the color drains out of Clint's face, but he says softly, "You jealous?"

"_What?_" Danny's face turns purple. He lunges forward, arm swinging, and slams his fist into the side of Clint's head.

The blow sends him staggering, but then he catches himself, straightens. He grins a blood-tinged smile at Danny. "Hit a nerve, huh? The truth comes out about you, Danny-boy—you say all that shit because you're wishing someone would say it to _you_."

Danny lowers his head and charges. His shoulder catches Clint in the chest and they go down hard enough to shake the ground. Natasha screams at him, flaming promises in Russian to tear his head off his shoulders, and she springs onto Danny's back and wrenches at his neck. He rears back, drives an elbow into her jaw and sends her tumbling, and by the time she's rolled to her feet, Danny is slamming his fists into Clint in earnest.

People are shouting, dropping things and running in toward them, but Natasha can barely hear it all above the roaring in her ears.

Clint's not fighting back.

He's _not fighting back_. He's lying under Danny, one arm crooked over his face, the other held up defensively, but open, loose. Danny's red-faced and spitting and the sound of his fists pounding over and over into Clint's body sickens Natasha. Her mouth tastes like copper and bile. She leaps for his back again and someone catches her around the waist and drags her back and people are shoving and yelling as the players from the field and the baseball diamond pour in.

Someone gets the back of Danny's shirt and heaves him up off of Clint, but the thin jersey splits down the middle. He lurches forward and slams his foot into Clint's stomach, flipping and rolling him, and then he falls onto Clint again, hands smashing down wherever he can reach.

Natasha's throat is scoured raw and she doesn't even realize it's from screaming Clint's name until Dallas the goalie wraps his arm tight and turns her face into his shoulder and her voice is smothered in his pads.

And then Danny's flying,_ flying_, backward through the air as three of Clint's teammates tear him loose and fling him away. It breaks down into total chaos then; some people are grabbing Danny and pinning him to the ground, some are bending over Clint and rolling him over. Someone is hanging on to a hysterical Bruce, some of the eighth graders are crying, and everyone, everyone, is shouting and cursing and pushing.

In the eye of the hurricane, Clint's arm goes limp and slides off his face to the trampled grass and Natasha nearly passes out herself.

Everything tilts, and then Steve is there, pale but rapping out orders in a commanding tone that has everyone springing into action.

"Has anyone called 911? You with the phone, call 911, right now. You, run inside, get the nurse and Mr. Coulson and have someone call 911 again from the building. Stop moving him! Don't touch him. You three, you got that guy down? Okay, hold him, don't let him twitch."

Natasha wrenches at the goalie's arms. "Let go," she growls. "_Let go_."

"Natasha, he's bad, he's real bad off."

"That's why you need to _let me go_," she snarls, and reaches up to jab her fingers into Dallas' neck, and then she's dropping to her knees beside Clint's still body.

Steve's hand settles on her back. "Careful, honey, we don't want to move him too much. An ambulance is on the way."

"Don't touch me! Barton! Barton, listen to me!"

"Here." Steve scoots around beside her, reaches out. "Here's his hand. Hold onto it, put your thumb on his pulse, just don't move his arm, okay?"

"Open your eyes, goddammit."

Steve twists to look up at the circle of people. "Darcy? Go find Thor, tell him Natasha needs him."

She holds up her phone. "I'm on it, he's in my contacts. He's in the theater, on his way."

"Tell him to hurry."

Natasha holds onto Clint's cold, limp fingers and tries not to vomit. There's blood leaking from his mouth, and as she watches, his chest jerks and heaves, and a bubble of dark red spills over his chin.

"He's choking!"

"Easy." Steve's at her side, moving into place beside Clint. "You two, with me. Hold his head, completely still. You, brace his back. On three, we're going to roll him, _carefully_, onto his side. Carefully, nice and steady, as little movement as possible. Ready? One… two… _three_."

Blood pours out of Clint's mouth and soaks the ground beneath his head. His chest heaves again, and then his breathing evens out, wet sounding and raspy, but steady. Steve's talking in a low, soothing voice, telling her Clint's fine, he's breathing, he has a pulse, an ambulance is on its way.

"Open your eyes, dammit," Natasha whispers.

"Someone get the kids back to the school. Everybody move back, I can hear sirens, the paramedics are going to need a clear path. Move back!" Steve barks. His eyes scan the crowd. "Did anyone get the fight on their phone?"

"I did, Cap. Jesus, Barton didn't lay a hand on the guy, even though he kicked the shit out of some little kid."

"Yeah, I got most of it, too. Shit, that guy just wouldn't quit."

"Good, the police are going to need it as evidence."

Clint shudders and Natasha leans close, her heart seizing. "Clint?"

His eyes peel open; the left one is reddened and swelling rapidly, turning visibly darker by the second. He gurgles something and then Steve bends and lays a large hand on his shoulder. "Don't move, okay?"

"Tasha."

"She's right here. You need to stay completely still."

"You idiot, you stupid, _stupid _idiot! _What did you think you were doing_?" she asks, and he blinks, moves one hand and feels hers against his wrist. He shifts his other arm, fumbling down his side and Natasha thinks he wants her hands on his so she reaches for them. He pulls away, fumbles again, and then he's pressing his slingshot into her hands.

"Hang… hang onto it for me," he croaks. "Don't let them…"

"Shut up, you idiot. Stop talking. Oh my god, you're such an idiot." But she curls her hand around the slingshot and Clint feels her do so and sinks back, eyes falling shut.

The ambulance drives right out onto the fields.

Somebody pushes Natasha aside to reach Clint and she would have fallen onto her backside except that Thor is there to catch her. His arms are huge and warm and he murmurs things into her hair while the paramedics swarm over Clint and police officers spill out of four cars that pull up around the field.

"Make them check Bruce," she hears herself say, her voice a distant, reedy thread. "There'll be bruises on his ankle."

"You're bleeding, too," Thor rumbles gently, but she shakes her head.

"I'm fine. Is he okay? Can we find out if he's okay?"

The paramedics brush off all questions. Natasha can't even see Clint, hidden behind equipment and moving bodies, and then they're sliding him into the back of the ambulance and the rising wail of its siren is one of the most terrifying things Natasha has heard in her life. Steve's talking to the police and Assistant Principal Coulson is listening with his usual grave expression, and there are half a dozen kids in line holding cell phones for the police.

She can't see Danny anywhere, and that's probably a good thing, because she remembers Uncle Alex's lessons and even though he never taught her to actually kill, she knows enough.

* * *

She doesn't remember getting back to the parking lot but suddenly she's standing on a curb with Thor bracing her upright and Darcy Lewis working her cell phone beside them.

"Your mom's turning onto Junction Road right now, she'll be here in three and a half minutes. Peggy's watching Bruce until the medics and police are finished with him, and then she and Steve are going to take him home. Dallas has Clint's gear."

"Thank you, Darcy. You are remarkable."

"I know how to multitask, that's all. Okay, wow, your mom made it in under a minute." Darcy steps back as the gold Bronco slams to a stop in front of them and the passenger door pops open.

"Where are we going?" Natasha feels disconnected; things keep happening around her and she's buffeted by all the activity. "I have to get to the hospital—I have to."

"That's the plan, sweetheart. Climb in, buckle up. Thor…"

"I have her, Mother." A second later, Natasha is deposited onto the front seat, a belt clicking into place across her chest. "Darcy…"

"I'll tell the cops where you went. Go."

* * *

No one knows, or is willing to tell, what's happening with Clint when they pull up to the emergency room. Hospital bureaucracy is no match for Frigga Odinson, though; within moments, Natasha is whisked to a cubicle to be evaluated while Frigga strides off to locate Clint. She's back by the time a resident is swabbing out Natasha's mouth and muttering about stitches, and she waits until he goes off for a suture kit to take the girl's hands in her own and squeeze.

"Sweetheart, he's not here. The paramedics suspected he was bleeding internally, so they headed straight up the highway to the Morris Trauma Center. No, no, sit down, you need attending."

"I do not." Natasha spits out her mouthful of bloody gauze and strains against Frigga's hold. "I need to go there. I'll steal a car if I have to."

"Listen to me. Just hear me out, one minute, that is all I ask." Frigga briskly rubs Natasha's freezing hands until the girl stills. "They will not let you see him, not until they are done treating him. They will stabilize him, they will do what they must to put him right, and until then, no one, not you, not me, not anyone, will be allowed to see him." She smoothes back Natasha's hair. "Stay here, let the doctors treat you, document your injuries as further evidence, and give you clearance to leave. By that time, Clint Barton should be closer to receiving visitors and I promise you, I will take you to him. If we have to wait, so we shall. Is this acceptable?"

It's not, it's not even remotely acceptable, but even in her disjointed state, Natasha can see she has no other choice. She nods.

* * *

An hour and a half later, Natasha has a line of stitches inside her mouth, an assurance from an oral surgeon that she won't lose her loosened tooth, an ice pack, and a prescription for pain pills. Thor stands ready to transfer her from the wheelchair to the car as Frigga pulls it around.

"Ready? Let's be off then."

* * *

He's still in surgery when at last they reach the trauma center.

* * *

Natasha is curled in a corner of the waiting-room couch, having finally exhausted her last reserves of energy, when a nurse comes in. "You're here for the assault victim?"

Natasha wobbles to her feet. "Please, is he…?"

"He's out of surgery and in recovery. That's all I can tell you." She turns to go.

"Wait! What do you mean? Is Clint okay? What was wrong with him? When can I see him?"

The nurse gives her a look of blank disinterest. "He's out of surgery and in recovery. That's all I can tell you. He's a minor and none of you are his guardian or immediate family, so no further information can be released."

"Please don't be ridiculous," Frigga exclaims. "This young lady is the closest thing he has to family—at least tell us if he's in stable condition? Serious? Something, anything—we've been waiting for hours."

The nurse shrugs. "Without a guardian or immediate family member present, information compromising patient confidentiality will not be released. That's the law."

This, then, is what finally breaks Natasha. Her knees crumble and drop her to the floor and she buries her throbbing face in her hands while tears leak from between her fingers.

"So be it." Frigga lifts her chin with fire in her eyes. "Thor, give me that phone. I will have the director of Mountainview on the line imparting every scrap of news she can gather within the hour, or know the reason why."

* * *

It's well after midnight by the time Natasha pushes open the door and slips inside, but it's a job well done on Frigga's part—she has obtained the official permission for Natasha to settle at Clint's bedside and wait for him to wake.

There's a chair large enough for her to curl up in, and so she does, tucking her head into the corner between chair back and arm and drawing her legs up. Lights blink hypnotically over the head of the hospital bed, and one of the machines makes a steady whooshing sound, like wind through the leaves of a tree.

She's afraid to touch him while he lays so unmoving, and so she huddles in the chair, and waits.

A nurse, different from the one in the waiting room, comes in and checks the monitors. She bends and opens a cabinet and then circles Clint's bed to drape a soft white blanket over Natasha. "Shouldn't be much longer now," she says kindly, and Natasha nods.

The ends of the stitches are driving her mad, prickling against the inside of her cheek. She tries not to roll her tongue against her wobbly tooth.

Finally, finally, the still form on the bed shifts and the blanket covering his feet twitches. Natasha uncurls and leans forward and yes, there, his eyelids—well, one eyelid—peel slowly open. Clint's gaze pans around the room, fitfully and unfocused, and then finally finds Natasha. He croaks something completely unintelligible.

There's an insulated pitcher of ice resting on the tray table, and a thin plastic spoon. Natasha pries open the lid, scoops out a melting ice chip, and holds it out. Clint's one unswollen eye falls shut in relief.

"More?" His head twitches in a slight affirmative and she scoops again, nudges the spoon against his bottom lip.

Slowly his eye peels open again and he blinks away cloudiness. His throat works. "You… okay?"

"I'm _fine_, you jackass. You're the one who… the one in…"

"No." He tries to move his hand, finds it encumbered by tape and tubing and a strap pinning his wrist to the bedrail and he tips his head toward her instead. "Your face…"

"…is fine. I bit my cheek when he bumped me. Oh my god, Clint, _what were you thinking?_"

He rolls his head on the pillow so the unbattered side of his face is towards hers and his gaze sharpens a little more. "Did it work?"

She frowns. "What?"

"Did it… work." His throat bobs on a dry swallow and Natasha pokes another ice chip between his lips. "Danny's… busted?"

Natasha stares at Clint in disbelief. "You did that on purpose." He nods, just one tilt of his head and she flings herself back into the chair. "You _idiot._ You let him _beat the crap _out of you—_on purpose_."

"Only way… they'd take it seriously."

"You… you…" Natasha lurches forward again, seizes the bedrail with white-knuckled hands. "Yes, it worked," she hisses. "Everybody out there saw it, saw you let him practically _kill _you. People got video and everything. The cops took him away. _Are you happy now?_"

Clint sags back and closes his eye. "Don't be mad, Tasha. Somebody had to."

She leans her forehead on the cool metal bedrail. "And that somebody is an _idiot_."

But she slips her hand between the bars and lets it rest against his arm, and Clint's mouth relaxes into the ghost of a smirk before the lingering anesthesia pulls him under again.

* * *

In case you couldn't tell, _Guys and Dolls_ is my favorite theater production of all time. I've seen it performed a dozen times at least, and will happily watch it a dozen more.

I might also have a _thing_ for lacrosse players. And whump.

Thank you so much for reading.


	5. Stick with me, baby

**Warnings for this chapter**: a brief allusion to a minor possibly planning a suicide (it's not attempted or carried out) ; some lewd behavior by an adult aimed towards minors.

* * *

Clint Barton is a _terrible_ patient.

The anesthesia has barely worn off before he's making Thor and Dallas and Dex steal wheelchairs (Steve refuses point-blank) and rolls of gauze so he can strap his IV stand to the back of the chair and be pushed around the hospital when he's supposed to be resting. He cajoles Natasha into lifting scrubs to replace his open-backed gown so his joy-riding isn't quite so breezy. Once he's cleared for mobility, he rejects the walker he's been ordered to use and instead careens from wall to wall, picks the lock to the roof access with stolen forceps, and has crawled halfway up the stair tower before an orderly hauls him back down.

"I'm bored," he complains to Natasha, picking morosely at the restraints around his wrists.

"That's your own damn fault for landing yourself in here," she tells him pitilessly.

The day shift removes the restraints so his bed can be changed and Clint steals IV tubing and a sturdy towel and sets up a post in the Pediatrics wing, rallying the kids to build a mega-slingshot using chairs and a coffee table from the nurses' break room. It's strong enough to fire bed pillows all the way to the elevators… until one of them (Clint won't say who launched it) nails the chief gastroenterologist square in the face when he steps onto the floor.

Coincidentally, the hospital releases Clint the next day.

He looks pleased but worn by the time the caseworker returns with him. He swings briskly out of the state car, and shuffles not-quite-as-briskly across the parking lot with only a slight drag to his gait, but the five steps up to the porch bring him to a screeching halt.

Clint stands on the bottom-most stair tread, grey-faced and sweating, unable to raise his knee the scant inches needed to reach the next step.

Two aides come out from the kitchen and laundry and make a chair of their arms to hoist him to the porch and then through the door and down to his room. Hectic color rises under his pallor, but he's forced to accept their assistance.

"Company tonight?" Natasha whispers after the last aide has left and she's slipped into his room.

Clint rolls slowly onto his side, eyes squeezed tight, and inches his knees up toward his chest. "Better not." His voice is thin, and he sucks in a careful breath. "I've got these pills, someone's got to dispense 'em to me and then check to make sure I'm still, I dunno, breathing or something. Someone'll be in and out all night—you'll get caught."

"Okay." Natasha rises from her crouch by the bed. Truth be told, she's not sure she can continue to spend nights pressed up to Clint's side.

Something's shifted, deep inside her in a place she thought had died long ago.

* * *

Clint spends his mornings with a tutor, catching up on missed schoolwork so he can still start as a senior in the fall, while Natasha goes to Summer Enrichment. Mrs. Pulaski had practically begged her to come back, but her pleas were unnecessary – Natasha had already planned to return. Besides, she needs to lead her scavenger hunt team to a victory.

In the afternoons, she walks (shuffles) endless laps of the hallways with Clint. He's supposed to be using a cane, but his expression had gone stony when the doctor presented it to him; it disappeared immediately afterward. After many, many circuits, he's able to stop trailing his hand along the wall for balance.

When he gets tired, (which he'll never admit, but Natasha learns to watch for his face greying out and his left leg to start dragging) they sit on the porch and Clint sends pellet after pellet whistling after targets. If no one else is around, he jolts stiffly down the steps and then drags himself painstakingly back up again, his arm muscles bunching from the strain.

"Are you sure you should be doing that?" Natasha asks.

He heaves himself up onto the porch with a bitten-back grunt. "I'm not peeing blood any more, so I'm good to go. And when I can move well enough to handle stairs, I can go back to summer lacrosse."

"Barton, face it—lacrosse is over for you this year."

"I can still watch," he says irritably, and turns and lurches his way back down the steps again.

He's restless at his slow return of mobility – the kids tend to stare at him in awe, making him itch to escape up a tree.

"I'm not a hero," he complains to Natasha.

"Of course not—with heroes, there's a lot less _bleeding to death_," she retorts, with sarcasm heavy enough that he'll know she doesn't mean it. Although that _is_ what it took for someone to finally acknowledge what Danny had been getting away with for so long.

He had been taken by the police straight to the same juvenile detention facility as Clint, to await a hearing, and later, to serve out his sentence.

Danny's stretch is considerably longer than four months, though.

"Sometimes I don't wish it on him," Clint mutters one evening when he's propped in the cool grass, watching Ritchie and some of the other kids tossing a basketball around without being harassed. "And other times, yeah, I do."

"I don't blame you," Natasha says, with memories of hot fingers at her waist, a rough hand in her hair. She ruthlessly banishes them and makes herself pay attention to the impromptu game.

Trey is giving pointers—a little mockingly, yeah, but without Danny's crushing remarks and insults—and the kids seem to be having fun. Cherie has drifted out from the courtyard and is oh-so-casually checking out the action. Natasha nudges Clint's foot with her own and rolls to her feet; she can recognize a claim being staked when she sees one.

"C'mon. Cherie's on the prowl and I don't want to deal with her deciding she has to take me on over Trey."

Clint works his way to his feet while Natasha pretends not to notice the effort it costs him. "My money'd be on you."

"Damn right. I still don't want to put it to the test."

* * *

They're on the shady side of the porch one afternoon when they hear the resonant growl of an extremely high-performance engine approaching. Clint straightens to peer down the road, and a second later a brilliant red car slews into the driveway. It rumbles to a halt diagonally across three parking spaces.

"Holy shit, that's a _Ferrari!_" Clint gasps.

The passenger door opens and Bruce hops out; there's soot smeared up his neck onto his face and he's wearing a shirt that's clearly not his—it flaps around him in a swirl of what appears to be grey silk.

"Thanks for the ride, Tony, it was really cool! See you tomorrow!" He bounds up onto the porch. "Hi, guys!" The front door slams behind him.

The Ferrari's other door opens and the driver pulls himself out of the low-slung seat.

"Holy shit, what is he wearing?" Natasha breathes.

Tony Stark whips off a pair of sunglasses that probably cost more than the yearly operating budget of Mountainview and struts up to the porch. He catches sight of Natasha's red hair and gives it—and her—an appreciative once-over. Then he sighs. "Nooo, Pepper would kill me."

Tony props one glossy black-shod foot (and are those_ alligator skin boots?_) on the bottom step and reaches into the jacket pocket of his grey windowpane-checked suit.

"So." He rubs his chin. Natasha can see he's trying to cultivate a thin beard, and he still has a bowtie looped around his neck even though his shirt is missing, presumably draped around Bruce. "My lab partner in there spends weeks asking me about neurotoxins that don't leave traces and poisons that are undetectable to forensics and what am I, a toxicologist? Not to mention the whole hassle of a murder investigation, or, y'know, the other thing that might've been in the planning stages, which, let me tell you, you can't just find decent lab partners on every tree, am I right?

"So I'm thinking I'm going to have to go the invisible venom route and to hell with the fallout, which with my background would probably have involved the Feds. And then Hey presto! I've got a happy camper in my lab again! No more 'Someone is going to die swiftly and silently' conversations, instead I'm getting 'Oh, it's cool, Clint had his insides rearranged to get NumbNuts off our backs!' conversations. So. Here." Tony plunks a heavy plastic box into Clint's hands.

Clint stares at it in bemusement.

"Well? Aren't you curious? Open it. Here, I'll do it, you probably have lingering nerve damage from getting stomped by Goliath. Hey, does that make you David? I think it does." Tony reaches over and pops open the lid.

The box is filled to the rim with metal balls the size of peas. They seem to glow subtly with a dark shine, and when Clint tilts the box, they roll against each other with a liquid chime.

"It's a new alloy I've been tinkering with, something that'll pierce metal. You know—cars, airplanes, maybe urban assault vehicles, I'm not sure about that last one yet. I haven't quite got the matrix down to make them truly armor-piercing, like for tanks."

Clint somehow finds his voice. "Tanks."

"Yeah, you never know. Kids these days… Anyway." Tony slides his sunglasses back over his eyes. "Thought maybe you could do a little product testing, see how they perform in a real-world scenario. Y'know, keep 'em on hand, keep 'em for just-in-case." He turns back to his gleaming car, and Natasha can't help but stare, because he's _swishing his hips_ as he walks.

"Thanks," Clint says blankly.

Tony flaps his hand dismissively. "Eh, like I said—replacing top-quality lab partners eats into my valuable time. Hey, listen, I've got this _thing_, so I've got to boogie." He slides his impeccably plaid-covered ass into the Ferrari and revs the engine.

Clint stares after the car's retreating tail lights. "What the hell was that?"

"I think… he was thanking you. For Bruce." Natasha pokes one finger into the box and gives the metal balls a stir. They slither smoothly, frictionlessly, and she shivers. "You are _so_ not going to shoot cars and airplanes with these things."

Clint shakes himself and tilts the box gently, to watch the mesmerizing shift of the pellets.

* * *

It doesn't fully hit Natasha until the first day of school that it's Clint's last year. They get off the bus and instead of bidding him goodbye for the day while she goes right, toward the underclassmen wing, and he goes left, toward the upper, she walks along with him and all the others entering the junior/senior building.

Everyone around her looks so suddenly adult that Natasha's breath catches.

What is he going to do at the end of this year?

What is _she _going to do?

"See you at third block lunch?"

She makes her voice sound carefree. "Sure. Inside or out?"

"Out. There's a pine tree… you'll see it."

Natasha has AP French; English and Phys Ed because they're required; Chinese, with one other girl, so it's like having a private tutor; and Latin, because why not, just because it's a dead language doesn't mean it's not useful. Phys Ed is right before lunch and trekking all the way up from the gym to the upper cafeteria leaves her sweaty and irritated. She grabs a wrap and an orange and winds through the packed lunchroom and out onto the commons lawn.

Clint's beaten her to their destination, standing beneath a huge old pine away from most of the students. As Natasha picks her way between classmates scattered across the grass, she can see he's talking to someone. And as she gets closer, dodging a hacky-sack game and a spiraling football, she recognizes the tall, dark-skinned boy from homeroom.

James Rhodes. Who, aside from Steve, is one of the politest people Natasha has ever met. Smart (he's been taking strictly AP classes for years), driven, and determined to attend the Air Force Academy, she thinks he's involved with ROTC, or the Reserves—something military, in any case.

"Okay, thanks. I'll think about it," Clint's saying as she draws near. Rhodes offers his hand in a brisk shake and then turns to go in a crisp about-face. He nods at Natasha as he strides off.

"There you are." Clint shoves his plastic-wrapped hoagie into his front jeans pocket so he can haul himself up onto the lowest tree branch. Shielded behind the thick needles, he asks, "You want a hand?"

"I can manage," Natasha says, suddenly prickly. "Just take these." She hands up her lunch, then joins him in the pine-scented bower.

"Good day so far?"

"Fine; busy. Going to have a metric shit-ton of reading for French." She peels paper off her wrap and takes a bite; the greens are already going limp. Clint has a grease stain on his pocket from squashing his sandwich as he climbed. "Think about what?" she asks as casually as she can.

He's suddenly busy wiping oil and vinegar off his fingers. "Enlisting," he says at last, and there goes Natasha's stomach into freefall.

"Why would James Rhodes be talking to you out of the blue about enlisting?"

"He's friends with Tony Stark, since, I dunno, preschool or something. I guess they were talking, and Tony said something about my aim, and…"

Natasha takes another bite, even though she's no longer hungry, and chews carefully, swallows hard. "And you're thinking about it."

"I have to do _something_." Clint's voice has sharpened. "Mountainview kicks me out one week after I graduate, because I'll be eighteen by then and there's a waiting list to get in."

Natasha rotates the orange in her hand, tempted to bounce it off Clint's head, knock a little sense into him. "The Army'll send you to the desert."

"Rhodes was talking about the Air Force."

"The Air Force will send you to the desert, too—that's what they all do with new recruits! Ship them off to the worst spots, because that's where they need bodies stationed! Are you nuts?"

"It's been said." Clint balls up his sandwich wrapper and jams it in his pocket. "I have to come up with _something_, Romanov—they kick me out in nine months." He bends, grasps the branch, and swings down. "I gotta go. I've got class."

She won't watch him stalk away—she glares at her orange and jabs her thumb into it and viciously rips the skin off.

* * *

Maybe in response to their conversation, or maybe just as part of his need to 'do _something_', Clint finds a job as a dishwasher at a bar and grill in town. He acquires a second-hand bike somewhere and goes pedaling off on it for the dinner shift after school.

He brings back mozzarella sticks and fried pickles and sometimes a box of wings, as a sort of peace offering to Natasha, and they don't talk about enlistment again.

But then Natasha catches sight of Rhodes outside the A through C homeroom and the next day Clint has rearranged his schedule. He switches to additional mathematics and science classes and changes his general Phys Ed class to Project Adventure, which offers rope climbing and tunnel crawling and other obstacle course activities… things that are going to look good to a recruiting officer.

Natasha bites her tongue and ruthlessly silences the little voice that aches to beg him not to do it.

* * *

One crisp October Saturday Natasha kicks Clint under the table. He's drooping over his lunch, and there's a pillow-crease down the side of his face—Friday nights keep him late at the restaurant, scrubbing pans and loading dishwashers, and only hunger rousts him the next morning. "You have plans for today?"

"Have to be back at work at five. Might crash again 'til then." He cocks a bleary eye at her. "Why?"

"Good. Get your bike, we're going over to the school. There's a game at one."

"I don't wanna watch football." His voice sounds suspiciously like a whine.

"I said there was a game, not that we were seeing it. Eat that and get a move on."

* * *

Music from the marching band drifts on the breeze as Clint brakes at the edge of the packed parking lot, bracing his feet so Natasha doesn't topple off the handlebars. She hops lightly down. A muffled roar goes up from the stadium and the PA system squawks something in an excited garble that they ignore.

"Drop your bike behind those bushes and come with me." She takes off into the sea of cars, zigzagging through the aisles.

"What're you looking for? There must be a thousand cars here," Clint says, jogging to catch up.

Natasha reaches the team's lot, which has a sawhorse emblazoned with 'Reserved' blocking the entry. "Help me move this."

Clint doesn't bother asking why; he just drags the barricade aside. Natasha stops at a sleek silver Audi with a 'Cheer!' magnet stuck to the back. "Here we go."

"Whose car is that?"

"Sage Zuckerman's." Natasha produces a long wire from inside her jacket sleeve and pokes one end into the window molding, wiggling the wire to work it deeper.

"And we're stealing it because…?"

Natasha has the wire down in the car now, and her face pressed flat on the window to see what she's doing. "_Borrowing_. And because Sage and a couple of her cheer posse were being vile to a sophomore Thor's sweet on. If anyone deserves to have her gas tank mysteriously run dry, it's Sage." She jerks the wire sharply, and then tries the door handle and Clint is utterly unsurprised that it opens.

"You're planning to run it dry on a road trip? Uhh, you do know I can't drive, right?"

"By the time the game's over, you will. Get in." She rolls her eyes when Clint doesn't move. "I learned to drive when I was _ten_, for crying out loud, as soon as I could reach the pedals. Get in."

"How do you know she left a key?"

Natasha grins. "We don't need a key."

* * *

By the time football season ends, Clint know how to both drive _and _hotwire a car.

Sage Zuckerman never does find out why she gets such abysmal gas mileage on weekends. It doesn't stop her from being nasty to Jane Foster, but it makes Natasha feel better.

* * *

Once winter break is over, theater rehearsals start up again. Clint has to juggle hours spent up in the catwalks with kitchen shifts; when rehearsals stretch longer and longer into the evening the closer they get to performance, his boss grows impatient with Clint calling out.

"I understand if you need to relinquish the lighting to an understudy, Clint Barton," Thor tells him bravely one day after Clint borrows his phone to call out of work. When Clint hands the phone back, his face reflects how poorly the conversation had gone. "Gainful employment is a noble pursuit."

"Don't worry about it," Clint tells him. "I'll work it out."

* * *

"You quit?" Natasha asks, startled.

Clint shrugs. "I can get another job after we close. Didn't want to let Thor down—he's got enough on his mind, pining after that girl. She doesn't take him seriously and he has no idea how to deal with that."

* * *

"She thinks me a buffoon!" Thor moans plaintively.

The fact that he's wearing a too-short bedsheet and a laurel wreath on his head isn't helping his case, Natasha reflects, but she makes sympathetic noises. "What happened this time?"

Thor only groans and buries his face in his hands. "He was holding the chem lab door for her," Clint says helpfully. "The latch snagged his toga and pulled it open in back and when he backed up to keep Jane from seeing his undershorts, he hit the counter with his butt. Knocked over two whole racks of test tubes and a bunch of flasks."

"Containing Jane's experiment!" Thor wails, and Natasha winces.

"I'm sure she knows it was an accident."

"She proclaimed me a pants-less menace and possibly a lunatic. I explained it is costume-fitting day, but…"

"…but that didn't really make it better, that a guy in a sheet had trashed her semester's work," Clint puts in, and Thor whimpers.

Natasha glares. 'Not helping', she mouths at Clint. She pats Thor's arm. "Just apologize to her. No excuses, just say how sorry you are. Ask her if you can help her to re-do the work; maybe she'll say yes."

* * *

Thor's apology to Jane Foster, sung in epic verse and delivered from atop a cafeteria table, becomes school legend.

Jane lets him walk her to class, but she insists on opening doors by herself.

* * *

Clint gets a new job at the public library downtown. He says shelving the books and straightening the shelves is relaxing, and they don't mind if he arranges his hours around spring lacrosse season. He doesn't bring home fried snacks anymore, but he also no longer reeks of stale grease and no one curses at him if he doesn't move fast enough, so he counts it as a win.

Natasha ticks off the weeks remaining on a calendar, just once, and then locks away the churning dread in her belly and refuses to think of it again.

* * *

It's a Friday in early spring when Clint goes off after school on his bike, to put in a few hours at the library before closing. Natasha had been going to ride along with him—the library is quiet in the evenings, and she has a long Latin translation due on Monday—but a bad bout of cramps changes her mind about perching on the bike's handlebars for a ride into town.

Clint flees the minute the word 'cramps' is mentioned and Natasha curls up on her bed with her book. She's sorry afterward she didn't make the effort—although everyone ends up talking about it and it's even in the local paper, Clint stays stubbornly closed-mouthed about the whole thing.

The details Natasha pieces together are: he's pushing an empty book cart back from the shelves when a young mother rushes out of the children's room, dragging a toddler by the hand. Red-faced, she cuts straight for the circulation desk. "You need to take care of that sicko _right now!_" she hisses loudly. Clint turns and looks through the wide glass doors, and a kid about nine or ten years old comes stumbling out of the stacks with a stunned expression.

Clint abandons his cart and yanks open the door. "What's the matter?" he asks the kid, and she points, speechless, back into the room. "Go out to the desk with the grown-ups," he tells her, and he ducks back along the wall, glancing quickly down each aisle as he passes.

In the row closest to the darkened windows, a man is hunched against the bookshelves. He's cleared a space in the line of books, giving himself a window to the piles of cushions in the reading pit. A book lies splayed open on the floor there, as if someone reading it had dropped it in haste.

The man is young, maybe thirty, totally nondescript… except that his pants are unzipped and he's sweaty, breathing hard, as he works his hand rapidly on his exposed genitals.

"Oh, Jesus," Clint mutters in disgust, and he ducks back, circling the end of the stacks while sliding his slingshot from his back pocket. The children's librarian is at dinner; there's nothing on her empty desk but paperclips, some crayons, flyers and scrap paper. He grabs for the first substantial thing to hand—one of the brightly colored wooden cars from the toddlers' train table—and steps back to the aisle. "Hey, asshole!"

The man looks up, startled, and Clint draws and fires. The heavy wooden toy rockets to its target, nailing the man solidly in the crotch. He drops with a strangled scream, clutching at his privates for an entirely different reason now. Clint stands over him while he lies whimpering on the floor until the police arrive.

Although they're impressed by Clint's takedown, the police are also intent on confiscating his 'deadly weapon', and it's only the night supervisor's rather heated insistence that they leave Clint his slingshot that he doesn't lose another one.

When Tony Stark hears the story (which of course he does, related in gleeful detail in email by Bruce), he laughs so hard he hyperventilates and falls off his chair.

Stark Industries donates a clean new train set to the library; and Clint, who continues to refuse to discuss the incident, comes in from school a week later to find a one-sentence letter waiting for him, signed by Tony: "Anybody who can drop a perp with a clown-faced train car to the nuts can work with SI Security Division any time he wants, just show up and the job's yours."

* * *

Natasha would _really_ like to ignore prom season.

And she'd be able to ignore prom season, except Trey is taking Cherie, and dresses, hairstyles, and other minutiae consume Cherie's every waking moment. Cherie wants a yellow corsage and for Trey to wear a white tux and she wants her nails done professionally. She and Kaitlyn, who has a date, and Ellie, who doesn't, haunt the consignment shop in town in search of gowns that can be afforded with Mountainview's activity budget.

There are posters all over the school and nearly every overheard conversation centers around who wants to go in on a group limo rental and who wants to drive to the beach afterward.

What Natasha wants is for it all to go away. Prom is exactly six weeks before graduation, and seven before Clint goes… where, exactly, she doesn't know, because they don't talk about it. Whatever his plans are, she doesn't need the reminder that time is running out.

But pre-prom fever becomes so inescapable it even enters Clint's awareness.

He comes out of the locker room after a game, lacrosse stick over one shoulder with his duffel hooked on its net. Natasha tucks her Chinese textbook away in her backpack, pushing off the wall where she's been waiting. Clint's frowning past her and she turns to see Thor giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up. She frowns too, and suddenly he's very busy loading gear into the back of the Bronco.

"So, uhh…"

Natasha turns back, and Clint is scrubbing at the back of his head and looking somewhere around her knees. "Sooo, prom… did you, uh, want to go?"

She can't think of too many things worse than being stuck in the midst of so much false romance, the dancing and slow music and low lights, when Clint's imminent departure is looming over it all. He would loan her money from his earnings to buy a dress, she knows this, one that she chooses and not just a second-hand one that happens to fit, and she can't let herself think of how devastating he would look in a tuxedo.

And once he's gone off into the world, all she'd be left with would be a photograph and another memory that aches when she touches it.

And so she shakes her head impatiently. "Not really. Prom is just a silly excuse for children to play dress-up."

And he looks so relieved, she almost believes it.

* * *

Pebbles bounce off her window screen, and Natasha rolls from her bed, tip-toeing around the detritus left in the wake of Cherie and Kaitlyn's preparations, and looks out. Clint's on the lawn below, his bike propped against his hip.

"You want to come with?"

He doesn't say where and she doesn't ask; she's out the window in a blink, perched on the handlebars in another.

They end up at a pizza shop crowded with people who couldn't care less that it's senior prom night, and when the sky darkens, they head out to the park on the far side of town. Natasha vaults down when they reach the parking area; Clint brakes and pulls out his slingshot and the plastic box from Tony.

"Watch what these can do," he says, and sends a pellet streaking toward the dumpster clear on the other side of the lot.

When they walk over to it, he guides her hand to a small, neat hole punched clear through the steel side.

"Well, shit!"

"Look around back," Clint tells her, and there's a matching hole in the rear of the dumpster, this one ragged-edged from the pellet's exit. "Stark wasn't kidding that these things can go through a car."

"You could kill someone with them."

"Yeah," Clint says soberly. He pockets the box again.

They wheel the bike up a trail that leads to a pavilion on a hilltop. Clint's not content to just sit on the benches—he climbs onto the railing and then swings up onto the peaked roof. Natasha follows, and they settle on the gritty shingles.

The lights are on in the town below them and fireflies are lighting up the park nearly as brightly. Natasha points up into the sky.

"Think you could shoot the moon, Barton?"

She feels him smile in the darkness beside her. "I just bet I could, Romanov."

* * *

He doesn't go to the graduation ceremony.

It's quiet once Trey and Sam and Ellie, with Cherie and Kaitlyn tagging along, have left in the state car with the caseworker. Natasha lies on her back, staring at the ceiling over her head. For a while she listens to the bustle outside her room, running footsteps and doors slamming, until finally one of the aides calls out faintly that anyone going to the pool needs to be in the van _now_, let's move it, people.

She rises and crosses the room with careful steps, watches her hand reach out, turn the doorknob. Down the hall of the girls' wing, into the commons; the rec room is empty for once, the day is blistering hot and no one wanted to miss swimming. She enters the boys' wing while her hand trails down the rough cement block wall, and she counts doors as her hand bumps over them.

Clint's door is open.

She leans on the doorframe and she knows he sees her because even now he never turns his back to an open doorway. His duffel is open on the bed, emptied of his uniform and equipment, and as she watches, he stuffs a meager stack of t-shirts inside.

"Did you enlist?"

He looks up from his task. "No."

"Are you going to?"

"Not yet. Thought I'd see how Stark's security job works out first."

A wave of relief so strong she trembles rushes through her, and she has to wait until her throat eases before she can speak. "I… I think that's a good idea. Now that you know the service isn't your only option, I mean."

"Can't promise anything, Romanov. I've got rent to pay now, food to buy, no more clothing allowance. I might not be able to swing it."

"You will." The thought of him out of reach, off in some desert or mountain range where bullets fly and every step is a danger, is too much, and she shoves it away. "You have a place?"

"An apartment… well, a room in an apartment. Sent in a deposit on the first." He jams the last rolled pair of jeans into the duffel and digs in his pocket, fishes out a piece of paper. "This'll be my address; and my phone number—I've got a cell now."

She leans forward to accept it. "I don't."

"I know. But you can borrow Thor's, I asked him already. So, y'know, we can make arrangements. When I'm not working and you're not busy…"

She reads the address on the paper. "This is all the way up near New York City, isn't it?"

He looks away. "Yeah. Stark Industries has a facility there, and I needed a place close enough so I could ride my bike. It'll be a while before I can afford a car."

She doesn't ask how two people without transportation are supposed to 'make arrangements'. Buses, she supposes. Or a train. Which means money for fares… "Okay. Yeah." She tucks the paper carefully away, pats her pocket. "We can do that."

"Definitely."

Clint zips up the duffel and slings it onto his shoulder; he turns to face her and his expression is the one he wore when she first came to Mountainview, closed off and guarded.

"So… you're off?"

He nods. "My room's paid for; figured why postpone it and hang around here another week. I've got orientation at Stark first thing Monday morning."

"Okay then." Natasha dredges up memories of lessons learned so that her voice comes out cool. "You take care. And, I guess I'll see you around."

He takes an aborted step towards her, but she's already turning, walking easily away down the hall (_head high, shoulders straight, arms loose, Natasha_).

(_Don't let him see the gaping hole in your middle._)

Later, after the sound of a hired car has faded into the distance, she walks in a trance down to the janitor's closet. She feels above the doorframe for the lockpick and a moment later is pulling herself into the ceiling.

It's stifling in the space beneath the roof; heat presses in on her as she crawls back to the corner by the vent. She's breathless by the time she squeezes herself into the corner and slides her hand around the beams.

The flashlight is there, propped in a gap in the framing, and a stash of acorns, dried out to useless lightness. There's an envelope, too, and when Natasha opens it there are five twenty-dollar bills inside.

The coat is gone, though. The coat that he stores away carefully each spring, the one that's been in Clint's possession since the foster homes with his brother, has gone, and Clint with it.

* * *

Whyyy do you hate parentheses, Document Manager, whyyy?

The conclusion should be up tomorrow, it just needs to be cleaned up and posted.

Thank you for reading!


	6. I'm the fella you came in with

Only warning for this chapter is angst, people, buckets of angst.

* * *

Clint turns out to be hard to get ahold of.

Natasha tries, during Summer Enrichment, picking locked doors and using classroom phones to call his number. She slips out her window, crosses Mountainview's roof, and drops down into the director's office in the middle of the night to use her office phone. One evening in the kitchen she lifts the aide's phone from her purse and squeezes into the pantry to dial.

She gets voice mail every time, but makes herself leave lame messages: "Hey, it's me, just wanted to see how it's going."

_Just once more_, she finally tells herself. _One more try and then I let it go._

She gets a postcard in the mail then, covered with tight, blocky writing. "Sorry I keep missing you. Orientation is more like boot camp, they gave me a gun! I work all night, cameras watching everything. I crash during the day. I'll try to catch up when my probationary period is over."

It's better than nothing.

But she stops trying to call.

* * *

The last day of Summer Enrichment is especially bittersweet, because it really is the last day. Next summer, Natasha will be… elsewhere. Working at a tedious job probably, going home to a crappy apartment in a poor section of some city.

Mrs. Pulaski hugs her, and gives her a gift card to the bookstore and a business card with her name and email. "If you ever need references, please contact me. I would be happy to write them for you."

Sophie-Anne's mother approaches her as the students scatter to get into cars. Would Natasha be interested in taking Sophie-Anne as a private student, perhaps one day a week for the school year? Sophie-Anne's mother would be happy to pick up and drive Natasha home, and Natasha can choose whether to meet in the public library or Sophie-Anne's house.

And just like that, Natasha has her first paying job.

Once school starts, she picks up another, in French. Brian had given up once he'd passed (barely) his credit requirement for language, and Natasha uses her freed-up time to find a paying student.

She tucks the money away in the envelope with the twenties.

* * *

The weather cools.

She's in the computer lab one morning (Mr. Wieller having suggested a comprehensive computer class for her—"It's another type of language, after all. Why don't you see how you do?") when she gets an odd email in her inbox. The sender is unfamiliar, a series of letters and numbers that looks like a code, and then some sort of corporate suffix. That it got past the school's rather impressive filters intrigues her, and so Natasha opens it.

"Sorry, Romanov, looks like I'm going to miss taking you to Homecoming like we planned. I'm not really supposed to be using my work email to contact outside people, so don't reply here, but I wanted to let you know.

C.B."

_Homecoming? What in the hell is he talking about?_ Natasha closes down her computer, grabs her backpack, and asks for a bathroom pass.

The Phys Ed office is empty; all the teachers are outside with classes. She pops the lock, slips inside, closes the door quietly behind her. Her fingers slip with dampness as she dials an outside line.

Clint picks up on the second ring. "Barton." His voice is rough with sleep.

"It's me. What happened?"

"Romanov. Hang on." There's a rustle, and faintly in the background she hears a door open, then shut, and then music switches on. "Okay. Everything's okay. It's just… No one's supposed to know, but I couldn't _not _tell you. Stark's PR office kept it totally out of the media."

"_What happened?_"

"There was a break in." Clint's voice still sounds gravelly, and she presses the phone tight to her ear. "Completely professional—it was more like a military operation. They had night vision, some kind of device that put the security cameras into a loop, canisters of knock-out spray and these big-ass assault rifles. They ambushed the truck that supplies the cafeteria somewhere out on the highway and came in through the service garage. Hang on." Natasha hears a can pop and hiss, and Clint gulps something down.

"Are you okay."

"Yeah, I'm fine. Security fired everyone in the service area, but I was on the roof."

"I don't care about your _job_…"

"I'm fine, Romanov, they never even saw me. They got into one of the server rooms and unhooked a computer bank, and then they wrapped it up to look like a cart of food trays and wheeled it right out into the truck. They were after Stark's research, the dad's, not Tony. He works on some freaky-ass stuff, down in the lower levels where I do not want to go."

"Why are you telling me this?"

There's a faint rasping noise, and Natasha can picture Clint rubbing at the back of his head.

"I stopped them." His voice is abashed, and she closes her eyes, trying to hear what he's not saying. "The truck came out, and I noticed it had taken a _lot _longer than usual for a meal drop, and when it came up out of the garage it was riding really low. A server bank is apparently pretty heavy. I looked over the edge of the roof and the driver was wearing a night vision helmet and so I, uh… shot the truck."

"You _shot_ the _truck_."

"With my slingshot. And one of Tony's pellets. I was trying to be quiet. The damn thing went clear through the front end like water, shredded the engine, stopped the truck dead in its tracks. They tried to get it going again and when it wouldn't they piled out and took off running. I hit the alarm and the rest of security brought them down at the gate."

"Holy_ shit_, Barton!" Natasha feels lightheaded. She gropes beside her for a desk chair and collapses into it. "I thought you were like a mall rent-a-cop or something! This is… this is big time serious!"

"I know it. I don't know what the hell Stark Industries is doing in there, and I don't really want to. But, see, the thing is…"

"Jesus, what else?"

"I sort of got promoted. There was extra training and now they're sending me overseas, for some security detail that's…"

"If you say 'high-risk', I'm going to scream at you."

"It's okay, I won't be on my own. There's a whole team, I'll just be the back-up."

"Back-up gets killed, too."

"I'm not going to get killed." Clint sounds irritated now. "It's not a war-zone. It's a parts pick-up from Switzerland and Security is all stirred up over that night, that's all."

"Oh, that's all. Well, I guess it's perfectly safe, then."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence."

"You said they had assault rifles!"

"And now they're in jail. Or, actually, I don't know if they're in jail, Daddy Stark kind of operates in his own system of justice, I think. Anyway, my supervisor swears it's a milk run."

"Shit, Barton, what have you gotten yourself into?"

"It's a job, that's all. I just have to keep my head down and shoot straight and it'll be fine. I just wanted you to know, that I'll really be out of reach for a few days."

"You better come back. That's all I have to say to you." Natasha is clammy with cold sweat, and her stomach is churning. Before she disgraces herself completely by bursting into tears, she twists and claps the phone back into its cradle.

* * *

Ten days later there's an email waiting for her when she logs in: "Hi, how was Homecoming?"

She deletes it and takes a deep breath and opens her classwork for the day.

* * *

It gets even harder to reach Clint. Natasha still tries, off and on, when she can no longer stop herself from dialing. She only ever reaches voice mail; she never leaves messages, because what can she say? 'Are they keeping you busy?' 'Get shot at recently?' 'Are you still alive out there?'

Anyway, he has to know the hang-up calls are hers.

Steve swings around at his desk in homeroom one morning. "Clint says hi."

Natasha looks up, startled. "He what?"

"He left a message, at, like, three this morning. I guess he works odd hours?"

'Odd hours'—_that's _an understatement. Natasha shrugs. "I guess. Thanks, Steve."

She leaves a voice message of her own at three the next morning: "Get a Gmail account, you jackass."

Steve's waiting for her Monday morning. "Clint says to tell you 'as soon as he gets to an internet café'." He gives her a puzzled look. "That make sense to you?"

"Yeah, it does. Thanks for playing messenger."

"No problem. Hey, Peggy and I are going to a movie this weekend, did you want us to swing by and pick you up?"

_Where did that come from?_ Natasha wonders. She shakes her head. "Thanks, but I do tutoring on Saturdays."

"Okay, maybe next time then," Steve says easily.

The email she receives from 22hawkeye12 (his numbers from the two lacrosse teams he played on) the following week says only "See you soon", but when it's followed ten days later by another one saying "Hi, it's good to be back", the knot in Natasha's stomach loosens just a notch.

* * *

Natasha _knows_ something's going on when Steve asks her if she has a date for the Snowflake Ball. "A friend of mine is in town for the holidays, and I wondered if you'd like to go with Peggy and me."

Steve Rogers knows absolutely everyone in the school and probably half of them would fall over themselves to date a friend of his, so Natasha can't work out why he's asking _her_. She shakes her head. "Thanks, but I don't think so."

"Just as a friend, that's all. Snowflake Ball is more about friends going out to dance, there'll be a lot of people there who aren't dating."

"It's really not my thing. You should check with Darcy, though, she's one of the cutest, most fun people I know. Your friend would probably have a blast."

"Okay, if you're sure. If you change your mind, you can always just come with us."

_What the hell?_ Natasha thinks, but she nods. "I'll keep it in mind."

The package waiting for her after school drives away all thoughts of winter balls and strange invitations. Natasha brings it into her room and sits crosslegged on her bed to open it. There's an airmail stamp on it, and half a dozen postmarks, and a customs label indicating it came from out of the country.

Inside is a plain silver tin, and something wrapped in a crumpled bit of Turkish newspaper. There's no note and no card, no festive wrappings or bows. Natasha pries open the lid and the tin is full of small sesame-honey candies; the mildly sweet scent that wafts up wrenches her instantly back to her childhood and she sucks in a breath. _When did I tell anyone…?_

She uncrumples the paper to reveal a tiny carved wooden donkey.

She hides the candy in her various coat and backpack pockets. The wooden jackass she slips into her jeans pocket for safekeeping.

* * *

Winter break ends without word from Clint. At first, Natasha doesn't let herself dwell on it; she has a big project for Spanish, and Clint's gone long stretches without emailing before. She goes to the library where she can spread out her supplies and immerses herself in homework rather than worries.

He never picks up his phone, either.

She knows he never answers at night—that's when he's most likely to be at work. But now every call she makes goes to voicemail, even when classes start again and she can get to her school email, swallowing her pride to send a blunt message: "Answer the phone next time I call."

Her emails languish without replies.

Finally she can stand it no longer; the strangeness of receiving a Christmas gift, when they've never marked holidays or birthdays before, and the long gap in communication after that, eats away at her peace of mind.

Saturday morning, Natasha cancels her tutoring sessions and pockets money from her stash. She hikes through the early-morning chill to the bus stop across town. An hour-long stop-and-start ride gets her to the train station near the interstate, and from there it's another swift but lengthy ride to the outskirts of the city.

Clint's apartment is in a sketchy section of town half an hour's walk from the station. It's a tall Victorian that looks one stiff breeze from collapse, but she can see why he chose it—it bristles with small balconies and porches and outcroppings that look easily climbable for someone who spends half his life on a roof.

His apartment is on the third floor. She climbs a staircase with missing balustrades and peeling turquoise wallpaper, trying not to touch anything. The chipped door at the top is shut; from behind it thumps music with a heavy bass, and she has to pound hard on the door before someone finally stomps over to yank it open.

"What."

His roommate has thinning hair scraped into a ponytail, grease-stained chef's checks, and a sweater that makes Natasha itch just to look at it. "Is Clint here?"

"Barton? Dunno." He turns and yells back into the apartment, "Hey, Andre! Is Barton here?"

"Naw, he came back last night, but now he's out."

He turns back to the door. "Nope. Not here."

"Do you know when he'll be back?"

Chef Pants turns around again. "Know for how long this time?"

The music lowers and there's a cascading sound, of piled junk sliding to the floor; a moment later the second roommate shuffles into view, barefoot and carrying a limp slice of pizza. "He went out with that Bobbi chick, so probably not for, like, a really long time." His eyes slide up and down Natasha. "You can, like, come in and wait for him, though."

"Bobbi?" she asks, before she can stop herself.

Pizza Slice leers at her. "Yeah, kick-ass girl, dresses all in black, comes by to pick Barton up at really weird hours. They 'work' together. If you know what I mean." He winks.

All the blood drains out of Natasha's face. She turns away stiffly.

"Oh, hey, I meant it about coming in to wait! We've got pizza!"

"And beer," Chef Pants puts in. "It's cold, even."

Natasha doesn't remember getting down the stairs, or out the front door. The cold air brings her back to herself a bit, enough that she can retrace her steps to the station.

The next train southbound doesn't arrive for another two hours. She stands out on the platform the entire time and stares at the bare tree branches silhouetted against the sky.

* * *

One of the aides pages her to the front hall Sunday morning. "You have a guest. You can sit in the lounge with him, or on the porch."

It's Thor, wearing a very long red scarf wrapped around his neck and shoulders and a very worried frown. He holds out his cell phone. "Clint Barton needs to speak with you."

"You came all the way out here for that?" Natasha asks dully. She doesn't reach for the phone.

"He said it was of great import." Thor pushes the phone into her fingers and turns away. "I will wait on the porch, fair maiden."

Natasha stares at the phone for a long moment; its screen is lit, indicating an open line. She's tempted to simply close the connection and hand it back to Thor, but then she hears a faint voice from it. "Romanov? Are you there? _Natasha_."

She lifts it to her ear. "What."

"Listen, I don't know exactly what those two morons told you, but I was at work. I got called in for a debriefing. A meeting."

"You don't have to explain anything to me."

"Bobbi works with me. She picks me up in the company car because she says riding in on the bike takes me too long."

"You don't have to explain. I get it. You're busy; I'm sorry I showed up on your doorstep like that."

Clint huffs out an exasperated breath. "If I'd known you were coming, I'd have said debrief had to wait. And Bobbi's my partner, that's all."

The word hits her like a bolt of lightning. "Partner," she manages, through stiff lips.

Somehow hearing him describe someone else as his _partner_ slices deeper than knowing this Bobbi may have been something… personal.

Even Clint seems to realize his misstep. "My _work _partner," he says hastily. "Just for my job, like cops, Tasha. She trained me, she's on my team…"

He's only making it worse. Natasha waits for a pause in his rush of words and then interjects gently, "It's okay, I get it. Good-bye, Barton. Stay safe."

She walks out to the porch, where Thor swings around with a hopeful expression. Natasha hands him back the phone. She feels brittle, and light, as if the winter wind could blow her away. "Thank you. You don't need to drive out here with any more phone calls, okay?"

She thinks he protests, but she goes inside without listening and gently shuts the door.

* * *

Steve spends a week looking at her with concern. The day before the long Presidents' weekend break he stops her on the way out of homeroom. "Listen, my friend Bucky is coming down for the weekend and we were going out to Bower Hill to go snowtubing. Why don't you come along?"

Natasha has suspected for a while now that he's been instructed to look out for her; it's the only explanation that makes sense. But why not? It's her senior year; all the songs say it's supposed to be the time of her life. She shrugs. "Sure. What the hell."

* * *

Bucky is tall, and handsome, and while not quite as much of a gentleman as Steve, still doesn't take more than a fleeting glance at her chest when she shrugs out of her coat. The drive out to the Hill is pleasant enough; Bucky keeps regaling them with wild stories of his exploits, and Natasha finds herself smiling at some of his wilder tales.

Careening down the hill is so exhilarating that for whole minutes at a time Natasha is able forget everything but the rush of cold wind on her cheeks. After a dozen or so trips, Bucky drops into his tube and pulls Natasha down with him before she can get into her own. He wraps his arms around her and shoves off hard to build up extra speed.

She lets him, without protest. They rocket down the slope and bounce off the tube at the bottom, rolling through the packed snow, and he's laughing when he gives her a hand up.

There's snow in his dark hair, and his eyes sparkle when he looks at her.

She lets him bring her hot chocolate when they take a break in the lodge.

But when Bucky walks her to the door in the blue twilight and bends to kiss her, she turns her face to the side with a rueful smile. "Sorry."

He shrugs, straightens. "No problem. I did have fun with you, though."

"Me, too. Just… that's all I can do. For now."

* * *

Natasha filters her school email so that anything other than teacher or administration messages are sent straight to another folder.

She never opens it.

* * *

_You've traveled alone before,_ Natasha reminds herself. _You can do it again._

* * *

The lighting for the musical is just fine, thank you very much. Only a major critic would notice the transitions are jerky and the spots miss their cues by a beat or two in a couple of crucial scenes.

* * *

College letters start to trickle in. Everyone around Natasha is in an agony of waiting; she watches faces go from tense one day to either crushed or jubilant the next, depending on the contents of the envelopes.

Jane's standing on a cafeteria chair one rainy day with her arms around Thor's neck. "Syracuse!" he announces, beaming at Natasha across the others' heads as she walks up with her lunch tray.

"Congratulations." She can't help but smile at the proud expression on his face. Jane releases him and drops lightly back in her chair and Darcy straightens up with sheets of paper pulled from her messenger bag, laying them in the center of the table.

"Since we're sharing good news: Berkeley said yes, and so did Long Beach; I'm still waiting to hear from San Diego. Berkeley was my first choice, so I really think that's where I'll be next year."

"That's fantastic!" Jane slides the letters over. "You went with all West Coast schools?"

"Yup." Darcy digs her spoon into her yogurt and slurps up a pink dollop. "I know everyone thinks I'm Little Miss Sunshine and Rainbows, but this place hasn't always been a bowl of cherries—I need distance between some bad memories and me. California, here I come."

"As long as there's a strong science program, I don't care which coast I end up on. I've got a list of twelve, but this summer I'm doing in-depth research to narrow it down even more." Jane hands the letters back to Darcy.

"What about you, fair maiden? Have you any plans?" Thor asks.

Natasha smoothes her expression before she raises her head and lets her hair fall away from her face. "Mr. Wieller made me put in a few applications," she says. "But even with the state's stipend because I'm JINS, the aid package isn't enough to cover the costs. I'll still have to finance most of it with loans. I'm not sure I want to be stuck with that kind of debt." She makes herself smile coolly. "I'll probably just work, maybe pick up some classes at Valley Community."

"Oh, I know what you mean," Jane sighs. "I'm planning on graduate work, I'll be paying off my loans for the rest of my working life."

"It's so totally unfair," Darcy says. "All your life they tell you to work your tushie off to get into a good college, and then you do and get stuck paying for it forever."

Natasha lets the conversation swirl around her as she goes back to picking at her lunch. Darcy's words are ringing in her mind—"distance between some bad memories and me".

Maybe that's what she needs more than college—a continent's worth of distance, and a clean break from her past.

* * *

The envelope in the ceiling is getting fat with tens and twenties, but when Natasha counts it one Saturday night, the total makes her stomach tighten. Clearly, she won't get far on a year's worth of tutoring.

There are job listings in the local paper, and on an online message board. Natasha starts taking the late bus so she can sit in the school library after her last class and comb through them.

* * *

A team bus is loading in the parking lot for an away game when Natasha comes out of the school. Someone breaks away from the equipment-laden players filing onto the bus and jogs over to intercept her.

"Have you word from Hawkeye, fair maiden?" Thor asks her.

"No." She thinks about qualifying her flat answer—_his schedule is crazy, he's wrapped up in his job, Stark Industries is crazy paranoid about letting its people have outside lives_—and then doesn't bother with excuses.

Her heart knows there's no word because he has a new partner, and doesn't need her.

"I wish to invite him to playoffs, but his phone has been rendered out of service."

Natasha's stomach lurches. "Maybe he got a new one," she says with studied disinterest.

"Perhaps." Thor sounds dubious. "My lady, did he mention a new residence?"

"No. I told you, I haven't heard from him in," _months_, her mind supplies. "A while," is what she says.

"Nor has anyone. I took it upon myself to contact his roommates. They report he moved out."

The world tilts around her, but from a dark corner of her mind, Natasha produces a careless shrug. "I guess he got tired of the squalor. I'm sure SI Security pays enough for him to afford a decent place of his own."

_Or with a certain single roommate._

Maybe Thor is thinking the same thing, because he looks deeply unhappy. "Fair maiden…"

The bus honks, and someone drops a window to holler, "Move your ass, Odinson!"

Natasha nods toward it. "You better go. Good luck today."

She waits until Thor has jogged reluctantly back to the bus. Then she turns and re-enters the school.

The computer lab is still open. She sits, brings up student email, and logs in.

The folder full of non-school-related messages is waiting for her, untouched since she created it. She clicks open the oldest, and works her way down the list.

"See you soon."

"It's good to be back."

"See you soon."

"It's good to be back."

"See you soon."…

A whole winter's worth, with intervals ranging from one week to three. Coded messages for "I'm doing something risky for the insanely secretive and cutthroat company I work for and I can't tell you what or where or who will be trying to murder me and steal whatever-it-is I'm protecting, but I wanted to let you know."

Followed by code for "I'm still alive. This time."

And then…

Natasha clicks on the last one. "It's good to be back."

She stares at those five small words until they blur, because the date on the header is five full weeks earlier.

Five weeks ago, Clint stopped sending her messages.

He changed his phone.

He changed his apartment.

For a long moment, simple terror scorches through Natasha like lightning. Her ears roar, and cold sweat trickles down the hollow of her spine.

She sits frozen, unable to kick her brain into gear.

Finally, though, reason seeps back in. She loosens her grip on the edge of the desk and rubs her palms on her thighs. Her head is pounding; she sips in air with one shaky breath, then another.

If he were dead, someone would have told her.

Even if he didn't have her listed in his personnel records (he would have done that, wouldn't he? Even if they no longer speak?), Tony Stark would surely notify her.

If not for her sake, then for Bruce's.

Not dead.

Not.

Just severing ties and moving on.

Natasha takes a long, calming breath. She feels Uncle Alex's training settle back over her like a cloak and she straightens in her chair and slides the mouse forward.

_Delete. Delete. Delete._

When the folder is empty, she logs off and rises. Picks up her backpack.

One more deep breath, and she's ready to go.

* * *

_Managing alone, with no **partner**, is what you were trained for, you foolish child._

* * *

Like Clint a year earlier, Natasha isn't going to bother with graduation.

She has a room lined up, and a successful interview as an interpreter at a North Philadelphia hospital under her belt. A budget, outlining how much she needs to save until she can relocate far, far away from the East Coast. A suitcase half-packed beneath her bed.

But Thor keeps gazing mournfully at her whenever they cross paths. And then Peggy is named valedictorian, and Steve is so head-over-heels proud of her that Natasha can't find it in herself to just brush him off.

And so one hot June morning she slips the stupid flimsy gown over her new summer dress, and bobby pins the even stupider cap to her curls and goes out to the state car with Ms. Martinez and Cherie and the boy who took Trey's slot when he left.

There's a stage set up in the home team endzone of the football field, and row after row of folding chairs on the turf. The stands are filling up rapidly.

Inside the field house, harried teachers shove the graduating class into alphabetical lines and try to confiscate beach balls and bubble wands. "This is a solemn occasion, people! Approach it with decorum, not like a circus!" Assistant Principal Coulson cries vainly, his hands full of silly-string cans.

It_ is_ a circus, Natasha thinks, excitement and anticipation thick in the air as the school band strikes the first notes of the processional and the show begins. Someone squeals, and the line starts to move.

It's as much a popularity contest as the preceding school years ever were. The salutatorian, a girl who barely ventured from the mathematics wing her entire school career, gets a minimally polite scatter of applause for her speech, while the class president receives whoops and hootings for his disjointed tribute to partying. Even Peggy, when she steps to the podium, draws a muttered, "She's such a stuck-up _bitch_," from someone behind Natasha. She thinks (hopes) Steve is beaming too hard to have heard, though.

It's the same when the speeches are finally dispensed with and the awarding of the diplomas can commence. Some names get scant notice, others a roar of applause and cheers. A few, with no family or real friends in the audience, get no acknowledgement at all.

"Amanda Palmer," Superintendent Fury intones, and it's time for Natasha's row to rise, file into the aisle, and inch toward the front. She twitches the polyester gown straight and gazes over everyone's heads at the sky as Fury calls out the Ps, then Quillen and Quinteros, and starts on the Rs.

"James Rhodes!" triggers a click in the audio, Fury's voice suddenly overridden by a rousing sound clip of the Air Force anthem. Rhodes freezes in his diploma-and-handshake, whips his head toward the top of the stands, and glares, and there's another click as control of the audio is returned to the sound tech. Natasha doesn't even have to crane her head with the others to know that Tony Fucking Stark has crashed his buddy's graduation ceremony.

"Steven Rogers!" gets such a sustained wave of shrieking and clapping that Fury has to pause until it dies down before he can proceed with "Lucrezia Rollins!". Steve's ears are bright crimson as he half-stumbles down the stage.

Movement above catches Natasha's eye as she steps from the risers to the stage. Over the stage, bright against the clear blue sky, drifts a blood-red balloon, a weighted string steadying its course.

"Natasha Romanov."

There's no extravagant response to her name. She hears scattered applause (Steve, and Peggy, possibly Darcy), matching whoops from both Thor on the field and Frigga in the stands, but it barely makes an impression as she reaches the podium, one hand outstretched to Principal Hill's handshake, the other to the diploma declaring her accomplishment.

Because above her there is a sharp _pop!_

Latex shreds rain down, along with a glittering shower of confetti. It drifts down in a shimmering stream, swirling on the light breeze before finally dusting Natasha's cap and shoulders and bright red hair.

She's almost smiling, her head high, as she makes her way back to her seat in a shower of radiance.

There are more names, proud words from both Fury and Hill, and then caps soar into the air, spill down again in a pattering wave. Airhorns blare from the stands, joining the swell of applause. Natasha registers none of it, impatient for the ceremony to be over already.

The recessional breaks down into milling chaos just outside the field gates. People are grabbing each other, shrieking, clutching bouquets of flowers and shiny mylar balloons. Natasha's gaze slides over misty-eyed relatives, friends sobbing joyously in each other's arms, impromptu photo ops. In the swirl of activity she glimpses Thor lifting and spinning a thin dark-haired boy, Steve with his arm around Peggy, Darcy being kissed by half a dozen relatives. Tony Stark is standing in the back of a groundskeeper's commandeered golfcart and passing out flyers—"After-party at my place, directions right here, take two and pass 'em on, after-party at my place."

She turns away, lifts her face to the breeze. Pinpoints its direction, and then she's tracking it back as she skirts the crowd of now-former classmates. She makes her way down the sidelines and out past the visitor's endzone.

He's at the foot of a towering pine tree, arms crossed, shoulder propped on the trunk. Scuffed bark dusts his jeans; he has sunglasses pushed up onto much-shorter hair, and a faded t-shirt pulling tight over new muscles.

Natasha stops at the line where sunlight turns to shade. "Barton."

He smirks, and her stomach flips. "Romanov."

"Show-off."

"Hey, I had to mark the occasion." He pushes off the tree and lets his hands drop; she can see the slingshot outlined in his back pocket and strange new calluses on his fingers.

"You're lucky security didn't come down on you for bringing a weapon onto school grounds."

"They never even saw me."

"_I _never saw you," she admits. "I didn't think to look."

"You think I'd miss this?"

"I thought you were busy working. Out of the country. With… Bobbi." The name is bitter on her tongue.

Clint shakes his head. "I quit."

Natasha's breath catches. He's not smirking any more, and he's watching her, carefully, that old closed-off blankness threatening to creep over his expression. "Why?"

"Got a better offer. Government-affiliated security, not corporate. They had an opening for a marksman and it wasn't like I had any ties to Stark Security, so I took it."

Natasha thinks she's heard wrong. "No ties?" she asks.

"No." Clint shakes his head, slowly, his eyes never leaving hers. "None. Never."

The crushing weight falls away from Natasha's shoulders, and suddenly she can breathe again.

"I've been working, yeah, maybe too much, but their training was top-of-the-line and the money's damn good. I've got a car now." He runs his hand over his hair. "You, uh, want to see it? Maybe… take a ride?"

Natasha can read the naked hope beneath the casual words. "A long ride?" she asks, and watches his grin wipe away all traces of guardedness.

"How long 'til you're sprung?"

"I'm already packed; they cut my paperwork on Tuesday."

"Cool." Clint falls in beside her, their arms nearly brushing. Natasha unfastens the gown and lets it slip from her shoulders, leaving it pooled on the bottom-most seat of the bleachers as they pass.

"Hey," Clint says, deceptively casual, as they head side-by-side toward the parking lot. "Wait'll you see the new hobby I've been practicing."

* * *

Thank you all for giving this story a chance, for reading, and especially for leaving reviews! They feed my soul!


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